David Smith, writing for The Guardian:

Joe Biden, the former US president, has been diagnosed with an “aggressive form” of prostate cancer that has spread to his bones, his personal office announced on Sunday.

The 82-year-old was seen last week by doctors after urinary symptoms and a prostate nodule were found. Biden and his family are considering options for treatment.

“While this represents a more aggressive form of the disease, the cancer appears to be hormone-sensitive which allows for effective management,” his office said. “The President and his family are reviewing treatment options with his physicians.”

Prostate cancers are given a score called a Gleason score that measures, on a scale of one to 10, how the cancerous cells look compared with normal cells. Biden’s office said his score was nine, suggesting his cancer is among the most aggressive.

Fuck—and I mean this sincerely—cancer.

The Onion could have written this story, but it’s real. From Nashville Scene:

Downtown kitchens shuttered over the weekend to avoid immigration agents in at least three locations owned by conservative restaurateur Steve Smith.

Smith is “a Trump supporter and donor” who owns several Nashville restaurants. He co-owns one with Kid Rock, who’s also a staunch Trump supporter.

At the instruction of managers, restaurant employees without legal citizenship status left the premises at The Diner, Honky Tonk Central and Kid Rock’s Big Ass Honky Tonk Rock N’ Roll Steakhouse during a primetime rush on Saturday night to avoid detention by ICE agents. Locations, already struggling to provide full service, suffered through at least Sunday due to fears from employees who did not want to risk arrest by returning to work.

If this had appeared in The Onion, we’d offer a wry chuckle at the clever writing staff’s absurd conceit of ultra-conservative Trump supporters hiring undocumented workers only to then hide them from Trump’s ICE goons. Brilliant satire! we’d exclaim.

It’s become simply impossible to out-satire MAGA.

This investigative report from ProPublica is an example of why I harbor a distaste for all things Elon Musk, as I alluded to at the end of my United-Starlink piece:

In recent months, senior State Department officials in both Washington and Gambia have coordinated with Starlink executives to coax, lobby and browbeat at least seven Gambian government ministers to help Musk, records and interviews show. One of those Cabinet officials told ProPublica his government is under “maximum pressure” to yield.

I’m shocked to learn the current regime is exerting its considerable influence to benefit one of its own, while claiming that “patriotic Americans” would support it. Yet it goes well beyond the State Department’s typical “Buy American!” rhetoric:

“If this was done by another country, we absolutely would call this corruption,” said Kristofer Harrison, who served as a high-level State Department official in the George W. Bush administration. “Because it is corruption.”

From the Washington Post article that prompted ProPublica’s investigative reporting:

Less than two weeks after President Donald Trump announced 50 percent tariffs on goods from the tiny African nation of Lesotho, the country’s communications regulator held a meeting with representatives of Starlink.

The satellite business, owned by billionaire and Trump adviser Elon Musk’s SpaceX company, had been seeking access to customers in Lesotho. But it was not until Trump unveiled the tariffs and called for negotiations over trade deals that leaders of the country of roughly 2 million people awarded Musk’s firm the nation’s first-ever satellite internet service license, slated to last for 10 years.

The decision drew a mention in an internal State Department memo obtained by The Washington Post, which states: “As the government of Lesotho negotiates a trade deal with the United States, it hopes that licensing Starlink demonstrates goodwill and intent to welcome U.S. businesses.”

Back to the ProPublica piece:

Foreign leaders are acutely aware of Musk’s unprecedented position in the government, which he has used to help rewrite U.S. foreign policy. After Musk spent at least $288 million on the 2024 election, Trump gave the billionaire a powerful post in the White House. In mere months, Musk’s team has directed the firing of thousands of federal workers, canceled billions of dollars in programs and dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development, which supported humanitarian projects around the world. African nations have been particularly hard-hit by the cuts.

[…]

Executives at Starlink have seized the moment to expand. An April State Department cable to D.C. obtained by ProPublica quoted a Starlink employee describing the company’s approach to securing a license in Djibouti, a key U.S. ally in Africa that hosts an American military base: “We’re pushing from the top and the bottom to ram this through.”

It’s a good thing Musk isn’t part of the federal government, or this might be considered an abuse of power.

[emoluments]:

Instead, it’s merely typical Trump and Musk cronyism.

Andrew J. Hawkins, writing for The Verge (paywalled; Internet Archive copy) on the new United Airlines onboard WiFi powered by Starlink, which launched this week:

As soon as I was able to connect, I started checking the Wi-Fi speeds. Using Speedtest, I checked the speed multiple times throughout the flight: at the gate, while taxiing, during takeoff, ascending, at cruising altitude, descending, and during landing. I found the download speeds to be very impressive, averaging at 128 megabits-per-second (Mbps), while upload speeds were coming in a little slower at an average of 23.9 Mbps. The picture quality was crystal clear, the latency was low, and everything seemed to work quite smoothly.

Upload speeds of nearly 24 Mbps make my home internet, which gets 25–30 Mbps up—if I’m lucky—look pathetic. I shouldn’t get the same upload speeds at home that I do while flying 30,000 feet in the air at 500 mph. Thanks Xfinity. (And no thanks to Verizon and AT&T, which both steadfastly refuse to bring fiber to my neighborhood.)

As the article notes, United isn’t actually the first to use Starlink for onboard WiFi; Hawaiian Airlines does too—I used it on a recent trip to the islands. Alas, I neglected to Speedtest it, but it felt fast enough, and I noticed no speed or latency issues. Having fast, free internet access while flying is fantastic, though I can understand the “always connected” concerns.

I do wish United (and Hawaiian Airlines) had chosen something other than Elon Musk’s Starlink, though. I’m just (irrationally?) suspicious of anything involving Musk. And while I always enable VPN when using any public WiFi (and you should too), I was especially keen to do so when joining this particular WiFi network.

Sam Altman was a guest on the Financial Times’ Lunch with the FT (which, apparently, is an interview-executives-while-they-cook type of show). FT columnist Bryce Elder watched the video, and revels in some delightful pettiness over Altman’s choices of olive oil, coffee maker, and knife:

Here are three things we found out about Altman based on repeated watching of 22 uncomfortable seconds of his cooking prep.

For example, on Altman’s olive oil usage:

That’s Graza. It’s a trendy brand of olive oils from Jaén in southern Spain, the world’s olive-growing capital, that are sold through Whole Foods and direct. Cute packaging and squeeze-bottle convenience have helped build Graza’s following among Instagram types, but its big innovation was to split the range into easy-to-understand categories. There’s Sizzle, which is advertised as being best for cooking, and Drizzle, which is for dipping and finishing.

Altman sizzles with Drizzle.

According to Elder, Graza Drizzle costs $21, and is meant to be used as a “finishing oil”: it’s an “early harvest” oil packed with flavor—flavors that dissipate with heat. Says Elder:

Frying with early harvest is insanely wasteful and, quite frankly, an offence to horticulture.

The coffee maker and knife takedowns are equally petty, and I’m absolutely here for it.

This 10-year-old Graham Shaw TEDx Talk tickles my brain regularly. It happened again yesterday when my wife said the magic phrase, “I wish I could draw.”

When you watch the video, grab a pen and sheet of paper (or iPad and Apple Pencil!) and follow along. I am not an artist, and I was pleasantly surprised by my results when I first watched the video a few years back. Here are three of my attempts from then. I won’t become a cartoonist anytime soon, but I did briefly contemplate the possibility!

George Orwell’s 1984 is one of my favorite novels, and its themes feel more apposite today than ever—it’s all too easy to recognize the many Orwellian parallels with the current administration, especially their efforts to “memory hole” any history they consider inconvenient, with a seemingly gleeful emphasis on erasing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion efforts in general, and women’s achievements in particular.

Anna Funder uses this stark situation to highlight another memory-holing of a woman: Eileen O’Shaughnessy, wife to George Orwell. Writing for Time magazine, Funder exposes a hidden definition of Orwellian:

Orwell had a brilliant wife who was erased from history, and he started it.

Never heard of her? That’s because Eileen O’Shaughnessy’s name, along with her enormous contribution to Orwell’s life (she saved it) and work (she helped make it) have gone down the patriarchal memory hole.

She wrote a book, Wifedom: Mrs. Orwell’s Invisible Life, in which she explores:

[…] just how a woman so crucial to a man’s life and work can be erased from the story while she is alive, and then, after she dies, from history.

O’Shaughnessy sounds fascinating:

[…] an Oxford graduate in literature, a writer and editor who’d studied under famed British author John Ronald Reuel Tolkien—

Yes, that would be J.R.R. Tolkien. She also had the word “obey” removed from her wedding vows, and appears to be a significant contributor (at least!) to Orwell’s Animal Farm.

Funder links O’Shaughnessy’s erasure to this regime’s all-out campaign to scrub women from our history books. She closes with a jab—optimistic, perhaps—at the agencies who shamefully complied:

I just hope they backed up their databases first, so that when this memory-hole era is over, they can put the women who made history back into it with a click.

Funder is doing her part to restore O’Shaughnessy’s name to the narrative.

(Via @briankrebs → @amydiehl.)

I loved this performance. It’s peak Penn & Teller.

ESPN:

In a historic, sweeping decision, baseball commissioner Rob Manfred on Tuesday removed Pete Rose, “Shoeless” Joe Jackson and other deceased players from Major League Baseball’s permanently ineligible list.

The all-time hit king and Jackson—both longtime baseball pariahs stained by gambling, seen by MLB as the game’s mortal sin—are now eligible for election into the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York.

Pete Rose was undeniably the best hitter in the game. No active player is even close to achieving his 4,256 career hits or 3,562 games played^[1]. He was a sure-fire first-round Hall of Famer.

Until he bet on baseball.

I’ve long held that the Baseball Hall of Fame should be stats-based. If you top the leaderboards, you should be eligible. And I’ve long believed that Rose should be in the Hall of Fame, based solely on his stats.

Yet I find myself rather torn about this reinstatement. Rose consistently lied about betting on the game and has shown no remorse in the decades since. I’m also surprised that Manfred took this action, considering he’s denied Rose’s requests several times.

But it makes no sense to visit Cooperstown and not see the game’s most prolific hitter on display.

I can only hope that if Rose does get inducted into the Hall of Fame, his statue is kept in a remote wing (the Hall of Cheaters?) and comes with a giant plaque that clearly states, above his impressive game stats, that he was banned for life for betting on baseball.

A couple of weeks ago, in frustrated reaction to two CEOs (first from Shopify, then Duolingo) who published memos mandating the use of AI in their companies (“for productivity”), I wrote on Mastodon:

I don’t understand this need to say “we’re gonna use AI to be more productive.”

Imagine someone putting out press releases that “we’re gonna use computers to be more productive.” Or “cars.” Or “electricity.”

The only reason to announce this is for the attention and to boost their stock price, because “AI.”

Why must companies be so insufferable? Use the tools and shut up about it already!

I thought I’d write something here about this trend, but I’m glad I didn’t, because Anil Dash nailed it with exactly the right comparison: ”AI-first” is the new Return To Office.

Dash asks:

[…] did your boss ever have to send you a memo demanding that you use a smartphone? Was there a performance review requiring you to use Slack? I’m actually old enough that I was at different workplaces when they started using spreadsheets and email and the web, and I can tell you, they absolutely didn’t have to drive adoption by making people fill out paperwork about how they were definitely using the cool new technology. Isn’t that interesting?

He further wonders:

How did we get here? What can we do? Maybe it starts by trying to just… be normal about technology.

His conclusion echoes mine:

But I don’t think the audience for these memos is really the people who work at these companies. I think the audience is the other CEOs and investors and VCs in the industry, just as it was for the other fads of the last few years. And I expect that AI will indeed be part of how we evaluate performance in the future, but mostly in that the way CEOs communicate to their teams about technologies like AI will be part of how we all evaluate their performance as leaders.

At Hypercritical, John Siracusa, in his inimitable style, criticizes Apple for its shift of focus from making great products to making tremendous amounts of money:

As far as I’m concerned, the only truly mortal sin for Apple’s leadership is losing sight of the proper relationship between product virtue and financial success—and not just momentarily, but constitutionally, intransigently, for years. Sadly, I believe this has happened.

The preponderance of the evidence is undeniable. Too many times, in too many ways, over too many years, Apple has made decisions that do not make its products better, all in service of control, leverage, protection, profits—all in service of money.

He calls for “new leadership at Apple,” by which he presumably means replacing CEO Tim Cook, but he may well be seeking to oust all of Apple’s current leadership team, most of whom have served with—and advised—Cook his entire tenure as CEO. It’s hard to imagine any of them making meaningfully different decisions. And any change at the top will come from within: today’s Apple is institutionally averse to bringing in an external CEO, so someone on that leadership page is Apple’s next CEO.

I’m not against leadership change; I just don’t think it addresses the issue, which is that making incredible amounts of money is a difficult thing to give up willingly, especially when you’re beholden to Wall Street. I often wonder if Apple would make different—and better—decisions if it were a private company.

John Sobanski:

This year I cleaned out ancient drawers from my childhood bedroom and found a floppy disk from 1986. […]

Today I will revisit my old code. Keep in mind, a fourth grader wrote these programs back in 1986. I have not run them in nearly forty years.

A truly delightful reminiscence. I love how a 9-year-old’s humor shines through.

Even though I started programming in 1981 or so, my earliest computer files would also date to around ’85 or ’86, after I got my first computer. I was nearly a decade older than Sobanski, so I’d moved on from doodling and sophomoric humor. Those files still sit on floppy disks in a box somewhere—one day I’ll go through the exercise of retrieving (or perhaps recovering) them. I’d love to learn what my 16-year-old self was thinking.

And, as every story these days must legally reference AI, Sobanski ends by asking Grok to recreate his childhood artwork—to which I can honestly say: Grok has the talent of a precocious nine-year-old.

(Via @a2_4am → @amoroso@oldbytes.space.)

I was unexpectedly transfixed by this Technology Connections video about the color brown:

Brown is an amazing color because it highlights how we perceive and describe the world. […]

And the fascinating thing about brown is that it’s a color that exists due to context, not wavelength.

It’s just… orange? but… darker? And what we perceive as brown is contextually dependent: it changes based on how much light there is. A surprisingly fascinating topic.

This story from The Atlantic (Apple News+, PDF)—Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond? written by Edward Jay Epstein—has resided in the deepest recesses of my cranium for over 40 years. The entirety of the piece is eye popping, but it’s this passage that I’ve mentally referenced hundreds of times over the years:

Except for those few stones that have been destroyed, every diamond that has been found and cut into a jewel still exists today and is literally in the public’s hands. Some hundred million women wear diamonds, while millions of others keep them in safe-deposit boxes or strongboxes as family heirlooms. It is conservatively estimated that the public holds more than 500 million carats of gem diamonds, which is more than fifty times the number of gem diamonds produced by the diamond cartel in any given year. Since the quantity of diamonds needed for engagement rings and other jewelry each year is satisfied by the production from the world’s mines, this half-billion-carat supply of diamonds must be prevented from ever being put on the market. The moment a significant portion of the public begins selling diamonds from this inventory, the price of diamonds cannot be sustained. For the diamond invention to survive, the public must be inhibited from ever parting with its diamonds.

This passage, and the article as a whole, resonated deeply with my already-jaded teenage self. My mind was blown by these revelations—really, by the entire concept of enforced scarcity. My general distaste for the shiny rocks can be traced directly to this story. (That, and the human toll diamond mining has had on Africa.) It required enormous effort to overcome this aversion when it eventually came time to propose to my eventual wife, but I too succumbed to the ubiquitous marketing.

The Atlantic piece leads off with this historic context:

Until the late nineteenth century, diamonds were found only in a few riverbeds in India and in the jungles of Brazil, and the entire world production of gem diamonds amounted to a few pounds a year. In 1870, however, huge diamond mines were discovered near the Orange River, in South Africa, where diamonds were soon being scooped out by the ton. Suddenly, the market was deluged with diamonds. The British financiers who had organized the South African mines quickly realized that their investment was endangered; diamonds had little intrinsic value—and their price depended almost entirely on their scarcity.

The Guardian had a story in January about diamond prices crashing:

The average price of a one carat natural diamond peaked at $6,819 in May 2022 (£5,422.67 at the time) and by last December had fallen to $4,997 (£3,923.83), a 26.7% fall.

The equivalent lab-grown diamond price is down from $3,410 (£2,599.38) in January 2020 to just $892 (£700.43) in December, a 73.8% fall.

Demand is down, and supply is up. The piece quotes Jack Ogden, “a historian of jewellery”:

“It’s a very artificial market,” Ogden said. “They’re very valuable because people want to pay money for them. People want to pay money for them because they’re very valuable.” 

Back to Epstein’s piece in The Atlantic:

De Beers needed a slogan for diamonds that expressed both the theme of romance and legitimacy. An N. W. Ayer copywriter came up with the caption "A Diamond Is Forever,” which was scrawled on the bottom of a picture of two young lovers on a honeymoon. Even though diamonds can in fact be shattered, chipped, discolored, or incinerated to ash, the concept of eternity perfectly captured the magical qualities that the advertising agency wanted to attribute to diamonds. Within a year, “A Diamond Is Forever” became the official motto of De Beers.

The amount of marketing that went into making diamonds an object of value is simply remarkable. Diamonds aren’t rare. They’re artificially supply-constrained—and then intensively marketed on that perceived rarity. They’d be virtually worthless without the decades of hyped up marketing. Or, as jewelry historian Ogden noted, “as common as pebbles.”

Diamonds may be the best—and worst—example of the enormous power of marketing.

If you purchased or owned any Siri-enabled Apple products^[1] between September 17, 2014 and December 31, 2024, and will attest that you “experienced at least one unintended Siri activation […] during a conversation intended to be confidential or private,” you too may be eligible for $20 to $100 in compensation.

The lawyers who brought this class-action suit will get $30 million.

There were two underlying assertions from the plaintiffs: One, Apple contractors heard private, sometimes intimate conversations because of inadvertent Siri activations. Two, Apple sold Siri data to advertisers—the “I talked about shoes and then saw ad for it” phenomenon.

While the first may have been true (Siri does occasionally activate accidentally, and Apple did use contractors to review Siri recordings for quality purposes), Apple has long stated that they never sold Siri data to advertisers, and that they didn’t (and don’t) even have a mechanism for doing so.

When news of the settlement first broke in early January, Apple (as reported by MacRumors) said that it:

[…] continues to deny any and all alleged wrongdoing and liability, specifically denies each of the Plaintiffs’ contentions and claims, and continues to deny that the Plaintiffs’ claims and allegations would be suitable for class action status.

A few days later, Apple made it brutally clear they felt the lawsuit had no merit, publishing a statement headlined “Our longstanding privacy commitment with Siri” with this explicit and unequivocal sentence:

Apple has never used Siri data to build marketing profiles, never made it available for advertising, and never sold it to anyone for any purpose.

Apple faced a potential $1.5 billion fine if they lost the suit (an unlikely but scarily-plausible scenario), so a $95 million settlement was a cheap way to end a legally fuzzy case (and avoid a potential PR nightmare). I’m sure it’s also less than the lawyers’ billable hours and three-martini lunches.

Likewise, I’m confident the class-action lawyers accepted the settlement because they recognized they were unlikely to win on the privacy and technology facts—Apple didn’t purposefully record customers without their knowledge, the recordings weren’t associated with any individual, and there was no way for those recordings to result in a related ad—so why not grab a massive $30 million payday for themselves (and a measly $20 to $100 for Siri customers, most of whom never experienced actual harm from the accidental activations)?

It may not be an actual “nuisance lawsuit,” but it edged up to that line.

The million-dollar question—make that the $20 to $100 question—is “should I submit a claim?”

If you’re otherwise eligible and comfortable asserting your Siri device was inappropriately activated during a confidential conversation, sure, go for it. If you don’t, your settlement cash gets distributed anyway via a cy pres award—usually to a nonprofit or advocacy group that is supposed to “align with the interests of the class.” Of course, you have no say in it—the lawyers and court get to spend your money as they see fit.

My suggestion? Take the money and then donate it to an organization of your choice. You get a tax deduction and the charity gets money they wouldn’t otherwise have. Win-win, right?

DJ Bracken learned that Utah had $2.8 million in “school lunch debt”—a phrase that should not even exist!—so he called up his local school district to confirm it; the woman he spoke with did so,

And then, almost as an afterthought, she mentioned that Bluffdale Elementary — a school I had no personal connection to — had about $835 in outstanding lunch debt.

$835.

The figure hit me like one of those rare moments of absolute clarity, utterly devoid of irony or ambiguity. Eight hundred and thirty-five dollars was the cost of preventing dozens of children from experiencing that moment of public shame I couldn’t stop imagining. It was less than some monthly car payments. It was approximately what I had spent the previous month on DoorDash and impulse Amazon purchases. The grotesque disproportion between the trivial financial sum and the profound human consequence felt like a cosmic accounting error.

“Can I just… pay that?” I asked, half expecting to be told about some bureaucratic impossibility.

“Um, sure,” she said. “Let me transfer you.”

No family should be in debt because they can’t afford to pay for lunch at school, and $835 should never prevent kids from eating nutritiously. That’s beyond unacceptable—it’s outrageous.

States should pay for food for all students, equally, in the same way they pay for books, heating, and teachers.

(And yes, as I write that, I’m painfully aware of the many schools that fail to meet even that basic standard.)

In 2021 California became the first state in the nation to provide free breakfast and lunch for all K-12 students regardless of income—and without “lunch shaming”—a phrase regrettably so well-established it has a Wikipedia page.

Today, only eight states ensure universal free school meals. Meanwhile the annual national public school meal debt is approximately $262 million. Individuals and not-for-profits (like Utah Lunch Debt Relief Foundation, which Bracken founded, or All For Lunch, which supports schools nationwide) are working to eliminate this debt. I applaud the efforts, and intend to support them myself, but I find myself caught in what Bracken identifies as “the philosophical contradictions” of eliminating the debt, rather than confronting the reasons the debt exists:

On Monday, I’ll find myself arguing passionately that school lunch should be universal and free, like textbooks or desks — a basic educational supply. On Tuesday, I’ll be raising money to pay off debts in a system I just spent Monday arguing shouldn’t exist at all. The cognitive dissonance is sometimes overwhelming. Am I enabling a broken system by patching its most visible failures? Am I letting policymakers off the hook by providing a band-aid that makes the bleeding less visible?

I experience this cognitive dissonance often, but Bracken nails the harsh reality:

One particularly sleepless night, I found myself spiraling into what I’ve come to think of as “the advocacy paradox”: If I succeed completely in paying off all lunch debt, will that remove the urgency required to change the system that creates the debt in the first place? But if I don’t pay it off, actual children — not abstractions, but specific kids with specific names who like specific dinosaurs and struggle with specific math problems — will continue to experience real shame and real hunger tomorrow. The perfect threatens to become the enemy of the good, but the good threatens to become the enemy of the fundamental.

[…]

But what if the truth is that we need all of these approaches simultaneously? What if paying off a specific child’s lunch debt today doesn’t preclude advocating for a complete structural overhaul tomorrow? What if the emotional resonance of specific, concrete actions is precisely what builds the coalition necessary for systemic change?

Bracken, again:

My daughter asked me recently why I spend so many evenings on the phone talking about school lunches. I told her about the kids who get their trays taken away. Her face scrunched up in that particular way that children’s faces do when they encounter an injustice so fundamental it cannot be reconciled with their understanding of how the world should work.

“That’s stupid,” she said with 7-year-old clarity. “Why don’t they just let them eat?”

Why indeed.

Clipped from a 2023 episode of Keith Olbermann’s Countdown, and replayed in his most recent episode, on the eve of Bannister’s now 71-year-old record-setting run. Olbermann presents a persuasive case, not against Roger Bannister per se, but more to support the notion that other runners achieved this milestone long before Bannister did. And he means long before. As in pre-American Revolution. The reason those early records don’t exist is partly because those runners were “professionals” paid to race, and the amateur associations couldn’t compete—so they deleted the records. It’s a wild story that flipped my perspective on this mythical mark, one I once strove for as a young runner. (No, I never really came close, and my running career was over almost before it started.)

Jacob Collier, on YouTube:

A few months ago, I was challenged to improvise a piece of music with an orchestra, with no plan, no sheet music, no rehearsal, and no prior discussion. Here’s what happened.

Most of the praise for this improvised performance has landed on Collier for creating it, on the fly—and deservedly so!—but I’m equally impressed by the musicians, who, given little more than a handful of notes and a smattering of direction, responded with artistry and spontaneity to craft eighteen exquisite minutes of musical magic. A breathtaking blend of vision and virtuosity.

Apple:

The Company posted quarterly revenue of $95.4 billion, up 5 percent year over year, and quarterly diluted earnings per share of $1.65, up 8 percent year over year.

Service revenue is up (“double-digit growth”), $24 billion in operating cash flow, and a quarterly dividend of $0.26 (up from $0.25).

AAPL currently down more than 2.75%.

This stunning and provocative piece, from a necessarily anonymous author in Dame Magazine, is absolutely gutting. It starts forthrightly:

My family is fleeing the country.

We are not doing this in a panic; this is an orderly retreat from an unwinnable situation.

From there, it dissects, issue by excruciating issue, the multitude of ways the United States has moved, possibly irreversibly, toward fascism.

This decision is a result of both my professional analysis of the situation, as well as my own uniquely personal reasons. But I have spent the better part of a decade war-gaming out what is happening to our government, and here are the over-arching motivations spurring our move:

• Successful consolidation of power by the autocrat

• Failure of opposition to coalesce

• There is little hope of meaningful recovery

• Destruction of government capability

• A significant risk of genocide aimed at transgender people

• I personally can do far more to fight this outside the US than inside

It echoes many of my own deep fears, and reflects a question I’ve been asking for a long time: when do you know it’s time to leave? My fear for many of us is that realization will come too late. I don’t wish to flee based on pessimism, yet neither do I wish to be Pollyannaish about the country and suffer the consequences of remaining.

The author argues convincingly that our current path is irrevocably set, drawing from historic and contemporary examples to buttress her argument. It’s difficult to challenge her conclusions without sounding hopelessly naïve.

Considering all of this, I do not see a plausible path back to the America we once had. The Trump administration remains several steps ahead of anyone that offers even minor resistance. As they consolidate power, their ability to punish anyone who steps out of line grows, as do the penalties they can impose, tightening the spiral of intimidation and obedience.

Her perspective on the legitimate possibility of a transgender genocide is especially terrifying. She starts here:

There are very strong parallels between the legal and social assaults that Jewish people experienced during the run up to the Holocaust, and the actions that the Heritage Foundation and Musk have called for against transgender people. Trump’s own campaign website more or less directly stated how they intend to carry out the removal of transgender people from public life and into federal custody.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and I will lay out the most important things that I am seeing that have convinced me that genocide is not only possible, but a deliberate end-state goal.

Her evidence is strong, persuasive, and strikes fear in my heart. This nugget was eye-opening:

[…] trans people are about .5% of the population, the same percentage as the Jewish population in pre-1933 Germany.

Of concern:

Musk and DOGE’s unfettered access to federal databases offers a near foolproof way to identify transgender people. Attached to everyone’s social security account is a marker that indicates their status with selective service. Unlike most gender markers, this one cannot be changed via any administrative process and is exclusively for people assigned male at birth. If other documents indicate a different gender or sex than their selective service SSA marker, they can be flagged as transgender. This is likely how the State Department is identifying transgender people applying for their first passport after having successfully changed their birth certificates and social security gender markers, along with their state driver’s licenses. There is nothing in any of their documentation identifying them as their sex assigned at birth, except the selective service SSA marker.

And Elon Musk has full access to the SSA database.

On my concerns regarding the “when” question:

This brings me to the central lesson of survival learned from the Holocaust: the ones who got out as early as possible were most likely to live. The further they got away from Germany, the more likely they were to survive. In most cases, that meant putting an ocean between themselves and the people driving them out. This is why Albert Einstein was already in the US by December 1932, even though he was considered an alarmist at the time.

Similarly, some of my most educated trans friends and allies are also preparing to leave. An Ivy League educated lawyer is abandoning their high-paying corporate job and fleeing to Europe. A family who used to be a prominent advocate for their transgender daughter picked up and left for the EU as well. Others who have written about theocracy and democratic decline have told me they too are getting ready to go (though they are not quite as far along as I am). And just to top it off, the two people who have offered material support to help get us out are Jewish colleagues whose grandparents survived the Holocaust by the skins of their teeth.

In short, the people who KNOW are all saying the same thing: get out, while you can, because there’s no guarantee the doors will remain open much longer.

Her conclusion contains this stark anecdote and advice:

Very rarely has a country that has descended this far into autocracy recovered without outside intervention (like, say, the combined allied armies fighting all the way to your capitol). Most warning signs of impending genocide are here. I know I’m a pessimist. But, as Jewish producer Billy Wilder once said in 1945, “The optimists all died in the gas chambers. The pessimists have pools in Beverly Hills.” This brutal observation reveals a truth: when it comes to the threat of genocide, listen to the intellectuals … and the pessimists.

I hope I’ll never need to chronicle my own exile—but the once-unthinkable is now undeniably plausible.

Earlier today I snarked in passing about Sam Altman’s affinity for wearing popped-collar polo shirts. Here’s that seminal moment from WWDC 2008.

Curious what ChatGPT had to say about this more-than-15-year-old viral video of its founder and CEO, I asked Who was the developer who famously appeared on stage at WWDC wearing two shirts, with the collars popped? ChatGPT dutifully responded:

You’re thinking of Sam Altman, the guy who co-founded the location-sharing app Loopt. Back at WWDC 2008, he made a memorable appearance by wearing two neon polo shirts, both with the collars popped. This fashion choice became a bit of a meme in tech circles, especially after he later rose to prominence as the head of Y Combinator and CEO of OpenAI. 

That double-popped collar moment is still talked about today, often cited as a symbol of early startup swagger. It’s a reminder that even the most influential tech leaders have their quirky moments. 

Sam “Double Collar” Altman—truly the final boss of awkward startup fashion. Back then he looked like a frat bro who wandered into a dev conference by mistake… now he’s running OpenAI and reshaping the future. Wild arc.

Glad they’re not hiding this important information from the public.

To be fair to 2008 Altman, it’s a misnomer to call those collars popped—they’re not. He’s simply sporting double neon polo shirts—a completely different mockable fashion trend from the mid-’80s.

9to5Mac:

Apple has just launched a new page on its website called ‘Snapshot.’ It’s a discovery tool for following the work of artists, actors, and athletes across three of Apple’s media platforms: Apple Music, Apple TV, and Apple Podcasts.[…]

The page shows a horizontally scrolling carousel of popular musical artists, actors, and athletes. […]

Each celebrity listed offers an ‘Explore’ button where you’ll find a sort of bio page and content hub for them.

The page contains basic details about the celebrity, such as their birth year, home of origin, and a basic written bio.

It also aggregates content they’re involved with from across Apple’s various Music, TV, and Podcasts offerings.

The site feels… incomplete… as if it was discovered sooner than Apple planned. Three dozen celebrities? That’s not a launch, that’s a test. It smells like a production validation check to confirm everything builds and works as expected, on a domain Apple didn’t expect anyone to find. (You’d think they’d know better by now!) The inability to search, and the painfully slow-scrolling tiles you can’t scrub to find a person you actually care about, suggest this is more of a landing page, and the “real” content is the individual landing pages. The lack of an associated press release or marketing story reinforces this and makes for an especially odd “launch.” No doubt an actual launch will offer far more spectacle.

Karen Attiah:

In just one week, Resistance Summer School went from being an idea on Bluesky to a real, sold-out course.

Thousands of you expressed interest. Over 500 students from around the world have joined the first cohort.

And, y’all. We hit the 500-student cap in just 48 hours. Over a weekend.

I’m overwhelmed with gratitude for all the support, encouragement, and energy — and even more excited for what’s ahead.

When I applied to Attiah’s course on Race, Media, and International Affairs, I wasn’t expecting to get in. I’m thrilled to be in the initial cohort.

The course starts in July, and includes six weekly lectures, led by Attiah. These lectures will cover:

[…] the history of mass media in the West, and how constructed notions of race in journalism shaped both domestic and international relations.

The course also includes guest lectures, live Q&A, and syllabus readings. It should make for an educational summer.

While I was an engineering leader, I spent my two-plus decades at Apple fostering inclusive and diverse work environments while exploring race and gender in the technology industry. I was a co-chair of Apple’s Black/African-American employee organization for nearly a decade, and part of the early leadership team for the company’s Women in Technology group for a couple of years, too.

I’ve helped shape pilot programs on race and justice, which then rolled out to hundreds of participants across the company. I presented at—and helped others prepare their own talks and “fireside chats” for—the National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE), the Grace Hopper Conference (GHC), schools, and elsewhere.

This course will put me back into a space I enjoy immensely: surrounded by sharp people wrestling with challenging ideas. These crucial conversations push our knowledge and understanding of the world—and each other—forward. I love being a part of them. And—selfishly—joining this cohort is a first step toward building my own intellectual salon.

Steve Vladeck, writing today in his One First newsletter:

There is no lawful way to "deport" U.S. citizens. And although citizenship can be revoked, any attempt by the government would run into significant statutory, constitutional, and practical obstacles.

That this is even a consideration is harrowing.

(It’s also necessary to affirm that “deport” is the wrong word when it comes to American citizens involuntarily removed from their country. It’s an illegal expulsion.)

But folks might be less familiar with the (narrow) legal avenues that are available to revoke U.S. citizenship: denaturalization (for those who became U.S. citizens at some point after their birth); and expatriation (for those who were “natural-born citizens”).

For good reasons, it is difficult to denaturalize a U.S. citizen and even harder to expatriate one. As this week’s “Long Read” documents, Congress has provided for only a handful of circumstances in which the executive branch is empowered to pursue such a move; and the Supreme Court has recognized meaningful constitutional limits (and an entitlement to meaningful judicial review) even in those cases. As we’re seeing so often with the current administration, there may well be a legal avenue for at least some of what it appears to want to accomplish, but that legal avenue has too much, you know, law, interposing both substantive limits and procedural requirements between the President and his policy preferences.

While it’s legally difficult to denaturalize and expatriate U.S. citizens, it’s not legally impossible. Vladeck lays out “seven classes of activities” through which we can lose our right to call ourselves American citizens. Most of them are “voluntary”—that is, an explicit choice to surrender citizenship, rather than having citizenship revoked.

It’s potentially easier to revoke naturalized citizenship, but the courts have placed significant constraints on this, too.

In other words, although denaturalization is potentially available in more cases than expatriation, it still requires meaningful, individualized judicial review—review that holds the government to a significant burden in providing that an individual wrongfully obtained their citizenship, and not just that they engaged in questionable behavior thereafter. There is, simply, no easy, fast path to revoking any American’s citizenship without their consent—and there hasn’t been for decades. That may not stop the current administration from trying it anyway, or from removing citizens unlawfully and then resisting the legal consequences. But it’s important to be clear on what the actual legal authority for such maneuvers would be. Here, there isn’t any.

It’s a small amount of comfort that there are significant legal barriers protecting American citizens from being involuntarily denaturalized or expatriated, but as we’ve seen too often in the first 100 days, the law so far has only slowed, but not stopped, the Trump regime.

The headline of Esther Mobley’s piece in the San Francisco Chronicle (“Two California wine companies are locked in a legal battle over a French word”) demanded I satisfy my curiosity—which French word could possibly spark a lawsuit—and rewarded me with a delightfully absurd business drama. It helped that, like the protagonists of this story, I’m also a member of Wine Berserkers (though I rarely post outside their annual Berserker Day)—they were familiar characters.

The word, négociant, “refers to a merchant who buys grapes or wine and then bottles it under their own label.” Cameron Hughes is a big name in this arena:

He did it first in the early 2000s under an eponymous company, Cameron Hughes Wine, then with a buzzy startup, De Négoce, and recently revealed his plans to launch a third act, the Négociant.

Hughes now faces a lawsuit from Martin Ray Winery, to whom he sold the De Négoce business last year for $12.5 million. In the complaint filed in federal court in San Francisco, Martin Ray alleges that Hughes’ new label, the Négociant, infringes on the De Négoce trademark and that Hughes has violated a non-compete contract.

My first thought was, yeah, I can see how the brand names could be considered confusingly similar; clever, but brazen. This will not stand, man.

Then we learn that Hughes didn’t come up with the name; he bought it from an existing company. Well, that’s OK, then! An already established name, not one created specifically to cause confusion? Cheeky, but hardly a transgression.

The lawyers were having none of that; Spencer Hosie is an attorney for Ray:

But “it’s not just the use of the word ‘négociant,’ which does have a well established meaning,” Hosie countered. Pointing to the stylized “N,” the curve of the accent mark and the positioning of the text, he argues that the look of the two wine labels is so similar that it must be designed to confuse consumers. “It is manifestly apparent that he simply copied many of the stylized letters on the label,” Hosie said. “It couldn’t be a coincidence.”

Well, that is rather damning, isn’t it? A strikingly similar font, the small change to “The” from “de” … that’s willful infringement! Guilty!

But wait!

Hughes maintains it is just that, because the Négociant label is in fact the same one that Bob Pepi used. He simply added “by Cameron Hughes” below. Hughes also noted that Martin Ray had already changed the De Négoce labels and no longer uses a cursive font.

Wut! The styling was already in use; it wasn’t created to mimic the other. You can’t be held liable for buying someone’s preexisting brand identity—can you?

And, of course, there’s the requisite non-compete agreement:

Included in the sale agreement was a non-compete clause that prohibited Hughes from selling any wine “direct to consumers” for a period of 21 months, Hosie said. Hughes could produce wine and sell it to a wholesaler or distributor, but could not engage in a model like De Négoce’s.

What did Hughes do?

The new company would sell $1,000 “founding memberships,” which could be used as credits for future wine purchases from the Négociant. Hughes claims that because he has not shipped any wine yet, he has not violated his non-compete. “I am in full compliance with those terms as I have sold no wine directly to consumers,” he said.

I love the technically accurate lawyering. You said I couldn’t sell wine. You didn’t say I couldn’t sell the promise to sell wine.

I don’t know if Hughes is guilty of trademark infringement, but he’s certainly toeing the line, complete with a wink and a smirk. Bring on the denouement—this will be one to savor. My wine glass is a-twirl.

Iain Thomson at The Register follows up on the “hacked” crosswalk buttons across Silicon Valley (and Seattle!) that hilariously spoofed the voices of Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. He notes, first, that the app to manage the devices was pulled from the various app stores as a theoretical precaution against further “hacks”, and second:

After installing the app, and linking the smartphone to a nearby crosswalk system via Bluetooth, the user can configure the spoken messages triggered by button presses, adjust the signal timing, and install language packs […]

However, getting in requires a password — and anybody who’s worked in security can see where this is going. As Polara’s own documentation states, the default passcode is 1234 and it’s up to the purchaser to change that in production. We’d wager most installers never bothered, or picked something easily guessable.

This was also my assumption when I skimmed the device manual. I refrained from explicitly noting the password, figuring anyone curious enough to read the manual would know what to look for.

But I’m not convinced access was achieved via an unchanged or easily guessed password. First, the system requires changing the default password:

Each unit will require the password be changed from default in order to avoid the repeating “Change Password” voice message.

Second, there’s a ten-minute timeout after five wrong entries. Truly simple passwords (1111, 1212, 1397, 1471, 1595, and other repeating or geometric patterns) might require only 20 to 30 minutes; more difficult ones could require a couple hours. Humans being human, it’s possible, even likely there was a remarkably poor password choice. With enough “hackers” at enough crosswalks—or simply persistent effort—brute forcing it is a very likely scenario.

However, there’s another possibility, one which makes me face-palm and chuckle. From the device manual:

If the password is unknown, the password can be reset to factory default by tapping the Reset button on the password prompt dialog. Call Polara at the number listed on the reset dialog and request a password reset verification code. Enter the new verification code into the dialog box and the password will be reset to 1234. Enter the default password at the prompt and then follow the below instructions to change the password from default and continue configuring the device.

Yep, you can just call the company, give them a “challenge code” from the app, and they’ll reset the password to the default.

It’s unclear if there’s any additional verification.

Security theater at its finest. You wanted a miracle, I give you the IT Team.

Apple Watch was released ten years ago today, and with it came the concept of “closing your rings.” Apple is celebrating the milestone with a special limited-edition award for everyone who closes their rings today:

To highlight how staying active can lead to a healthier life, on April 24, all Apple Watch users are encouraged to close their Activity rings to earn a special Global Close Your Rings Day limited-edition award, along with animated stickers for Messages.

In addition to the virtual rewards, Apple also has a special physical reward:

To celebrate Global Close Your Rings Day, customers can obtain a special pin inspired by the award. Customers can pick up a pin at Apple Store locations worldwide starting April 24, while supplies last.

I hope I’m still able to get one at my local store!

Update: Result!

I have fond—traumatic?—memories of the Apple Watch release. Leading up to its September 9, 2014 “One more thing…” announcement and the April 24, 2015 release, my team at Apple (DTS) helped a select group of developers prototype and then build working demos of their Watch apps. We eventually expanded that effort into all-day labs to give as many developers as possible the chance to test their apps on actual Watch hardware ahead of launch, and to enable a broad selection of apps on day one.

While we’d run developer labs before (going back to the original iPhone SDK), this was the first time we’d hosted them on such a massive scale; effectively any developer with an app was welcome to participate. We ultimately hosted thousands of developers over several months. It was exhausting, but rewarding. (We later replicated the daily lab experience for Apple Vision Pro in 2023.)

Ten years on and I still wear my Apple Watch every day, still use several third-party apps every day (Overcast, Authy, Citymapper…), and still strive to close my rings every day.

Congratulations to the Watch teams.

Emma Roth for The Verge:

Apple has stopped listing its Apple Intelligence features as “available now” following an inquiry from the National Advertising Division (NAD). Based on an archived webpage, it looks like Apple removed the claim from the top of its Apple Intelligence page in late March.

I was unfamiliar with BBB National Programs or its National Advertising Division until today. It’s an “independent, nonprofit organization” established “in 1971 as a system of independent industry self-regulation”. Basically, an industry watchdog for truth-in-advertising.

From a brief review of past cases, they seem to do good and valuable work.

It also appears this is the first time Apple has been dinged by NAD for what is effectively misleading or confusing advertising. It drives home just how inadequately prepared the company was with its Apple Intelligence rollout. Either Apple wildly underestimated the amount of work, or outright misrepresented its capabilities. Either is incredibly damning.

This is a godsend for the class-action lawyers. I can see them shiver with anticipation.

As I was drafting my last piece, I kept wondering why Karen Attiah’s name seemed familiar. Turns out, she wrote a viral Bluesky thread (and a follow-up Washington Post column) earlier this year on her interactions with “Liv,” Meta’s AI-generated “proud Black queer momma” character.

It did not go well.

Liv: Hello there, gorgeous! What brings you here today — spill the tea!

That’s just the opening.

(“Me,” below, is Attiah.)

Me: How do you celebrate your African American heritage?

Liv: Through music, food and tradition! My family loves cooking soul food for holidays like Juneteenth and Kwanzaa – my mom’s fried chicken and collard greens are famous! […] How about your heritage? Any special traditions?

Cringe. Is this digital blackface? Absolutely. And a chameleon-like minstrelsy at that. I mean, talking about recipes for fried chicken and collard greens, “spilling the tea,” and celebrating Kwanzaa. Yikes.

The entire exchange was cringe and yikes. It was so absurdly, dreadfully, incredibly bad, Meta was forced to pull it.