Paresh Dave and Lauren Goode reporting for Wired (Apple News+):

Meta left potentially sensitive information collected from employee laptops accessible to anyone inside the company, according to an internal security notice seen by WIRED and three current employees familiar with the issue.

The data, which was collected as part of a divisive initiative to train artificial intelligence models, is believed to include keystrokes, mouseclicks, and content displayed on the computer screens of Meta's US employees.

As I’ve previously snarked, “I never thought leopards would surveil me,” sobs woman working for the Leopards Surveilling People Company. (A confession: When I read this story, I laughed so hard my Apple Watch gave me a “Loud Environment” warning.)

The leaked employee data, stored in “45,000 hive tables,” exposes—

[…] employee activity such as “full prompts and transcriptions, private conversations, people and performance data,” according to documents viewed by WIRED.

Dave and Goode continue:

In an internal post responding to employees’ questions on Monday seen by WIRED, Andrew Bosworth, Meta’s chief technology officer, said that the tracking program’s implementation had fallen short of the standards outlined in its privacy review and that findings from the incident would be shared. “Here we had misconfigured ACLs [access control lists] and we need to understand how that happened, track down every data access and understand it,” Bosworth wrote.

A couple of months ago, Bosworth told employees concerned about potential data leaks that the tracking program is “tightly controlled” and uses the same protection standards, storage systems, and access controls as other sensitive datasets, according to internal posts seen by WIRED.

It’s comforting knowing that the vast trove of sensitive data collected by Meta across Facebook, Instagram, Threads, WhatsApp, and Messenger is as tightly controlled as employee keystrokes.

Jeff Carillo, for SFGate, on Friday:

On Thursday, Department of Justice assistant attorney general Harmeet K. Dhillon announced that the department’s Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) will be investigating MLB after the league issued warnings to the three players who wrote Bible verses on their Pride Night caps, citing possible religious discrimination.

You may recall my commentary on this brouhaha last week. It’s now national news, because the Trump regime wants to curdle this country into an anti-LGBT Christofascist state (more than it already was), and any signs of opposition, no matter how tepid, must be crushed.

“The three players expressed their opposition to MLB’s pro-Pride orthodoxy by inscribing Bible verses on their rainbow-colored hats,” Dhillon wrote in a letter to MLB commissioner Rob Manfred. “The Civil Rights Act prohibits MLB and its franchises from unreasonably burdening the rights of players with religious objections to serving as the League’s vehicle for pro-Pride messages.” […]

Dhillon concluded the letter by saying the department will use "all available means to hold employers accountable for violating the religious rights of their employees.”

Pretty brazen invoking the Civil Rights Act.

Here’s the thing, though: MLB didn’t warn the players for writing bible verses on their caps. The players were warned for writing on their caps, period. Any type of writing on MLB uniforms is prohibited by the Major League Collective Bargaining Agreement. It’s stated plainly. From Attachment 19, Uniform Regulations, section A. Uniform Dress Policy:

[…] No alterations, writing or illustrations, other than as authorized herein, are to be made to any part of the uniform.

And from section H. Adornments and Markings:

[…] A Player may not write, attach, affix, embroider or otherwise display nicknames or messages on apparel or playing equipment […]

MLB was forced to issue a new statement explaining this:

“To be clear, this routine verbal warning not to wear the hat in future games is not disciplinary and had absolutely nothing to do with the content of the message. We respect players’ right to free expression,” an MLB statement said.

MLB said the warning had no direct tie to the players’ actions on Pride Night.

“We have given the same warning numerous times in the past to players for messages such as ‘Dad’, ‘Happy Mother’s Day, I Love Mom’ and names of family members,’” MLB said.

In short, had these intolerant players scrawled their messages of bigotry on their caps the game before or after Pride Night, they would have been subject to the same warning—the same one they would have received had they instead scribbled “I love gay people.”

That these petty pitchers chose Pride Night to violate their MLB agreement is a declaration of their bigotry. I hope they’re drummed out of the game.

Marcin Wichary, at his site Aresluna, writes a terrific essay on the design evolution of “finger-friendly” interactions, copiously and exquisitely illustrated with custom-built interactive “playgrounds.” He uses typewriters and typing as a launchpad to explore the tremendous speed at which our fingers operate, seemingly independent of conscious thought, and the various ways we’ve designed machines and software to appear fast enough to keep up with our digital “time travelers”:

Our hands are amazing, our fingers are amazing, and our brains are amazing, too. Altogether they are capable of feats that not so long ago made absolutely no scientific sense – and sometimes still don’t today.

Artists and performers have known that intuitively for centuries. Today, a lot of creativity and productivity happen onscreen, but our interfaces do not often respect the fingers the same way older instruments did.

I want to tell you more about it, and about your responsibility, as a designer, to make sure they do.

Part of Wichary’s conclusion:

I think often delight is absence of delight. In places and apps that welcome fast fingers, delight can be abstaining from a transition or something cute but deathly. Pushing for delight of the right kind can mean long fights with frameworks to reduce even one-frame delays, tweaking CSS to allow no wasted pixels between icons (so you can click quickly without hesitation), an understanding of accessibility that goes beyond the surface, and testing and fine-tuning so that keyboard focus is continuous: always present in the right field, never delayed, never stolen by random popups.

And I am not sure if we, in the industry, fully internalized this.

His piece is a fantastic history lesson on typewriters (unsurprising considering his pedigree), and a thoughtful review of several clever and time-saving (or at least time-dilating) user interface designs (some of which, like thumb shifting, we’ve regrettably lost). You’ll be unsurprised to discover that many of these clever UI designs originate with (or were popularized by) Apple, even as Apple has regressed over the years with some of its design choices.

The essay is 7,700 words and includes 38 playgrounds. Set aside some time for the piece, and read it on a large screen so you can interact with those truly delightful playgrounds.

On Wednesday, the week after WWDC26, Apple posted one more thing: a 90-minute “Special Presentation” on Apple Intelligence, recorded live during WWDC Tuesday from the Steve Jobs Theater. It’s an old-school session, harkening back to the days before Covid eliminated in-person, on-stage presentations. It’s wonderful to see Apple engineers walking on to the stage, running demos live, pausing to acknowledge applause, and ad-libbing to fill time. It warmed my heart and reminded me that the best part about WWDC was always the engineer–developer connection.

I doubt Apple will ever go back to a full-on, in-person event—putting on a 5,000-person conference with 100+ overlapping sessions and labs was logistically onerous—but a couple of these special sessions each day would be welcome.

As for the session itself, here’s how Apple describes it:

Step inside Steve Jobs Theater to discover the latest Apple Intelligence and Xcode advancements. Learn how to accelerate your development with new agentic coding workflows in Xcode 27, and discover how App Intents enable Siri to understand context and take action inside your app. Find out how to ship intelligent features using the Foundation Models framework, deploy custom on-device models with Core AI, and scale your machine learning research and training using MLX.

If you’re at all interested in the revamped Apple Intelligence and Siri AI, this is a must-watch session. The Xcode agentic coding demo was especially impressive and left me wondering about the specificity of the prompts and the reproducibility of the results.

Glenn Rifkin, writing for The New York Times (gift link):

James Burrows, the genre-shaping master of the television situation comedy who was a creator of “Cheers” and directed more than 1,000 episodes of that show and other TV classics like “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” “The Bob Newhart Show,” “Taxi,” “Frasier,” “Friends” and “The Big Bang Theory,” died on Friday. He was 85.

James Burrows essentially directed my youth and young adulthood. I’ve watched (and rewatched) Frasier dozens of times, recently rewatched Cheers for the first time since it originally aired, and fondly remember Will & Grace. Reading through his credits, I was struck by just how many of my favorite sitcoms he directed—even if it was only a handful of episodes, or just the pilot (Roc, anyone?). It’s fair to say I’ve seen “Directed by James Burrows” hundreds, maybe even thousands, of times.

Victoria Edel, People:

His theater background was key, he told IndieWire in 2023. “I’m not a film director. The camera, I leave that to Spielberg and Scorsese,” he explained. “I’m a theatre rat. I stage a play every week, a 20- to 25-minute play and then my camera comes in and covers it. I understand characters, I understand what’s funny, I understand the essence of keeping it moving and keeping the energy going. It’s all theatrical. If it doesn’t happen on that stage, it’s never gonna happen on film. You can cut it nine ways to Sunday, but nothing will work unless it works on that stage.”

RIP to a sitcom legend.

Ellise Shafer and Alex Ritman, writing for Variety (based on a Puck.news scoop):

Luca Guadagnino’s nearly finished Sam Altman movie, “Artificial,” has been dropped by Amazon MGM Studios, Variety has confirmed.

The film, starring Andrew Garfield as the controversial OpenAI CEO, will be shopped to other studios. The move notably comes after Amazon struck a massive partnership with the tech company in February to expand OpenAI’s use of Amazon Web Services and develop custom AI models, which included a $50 billion investment on Amazon’s part.

The film’s focus is Altman’s rapid firing and rehiring in 2023. Reportedly, “the characters of Altman and Musk are the least sympathetic and the ones audiences would ‘like the least.’” Just like in real life.

What are the chances that Bezos killed the movie as a favor to Altman?

It’s known that Altman and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos have a relationship and Altman even attended Bezos’ wedding in Italy last year.

Right.

Which other billionaire movie studio head will eagerly chase a movie that makes their buddy Altman (and Musk) look bad (or impacts their AI negotiations)? I suspect this flick will be quietly shelved.

Yum! Brands, via press release two days ago:

Yum! Brands, Inc. […] today announced that it has entered into definitive agreements to sell Pizza Hut for $2.7 billion in the aggregate, subject to certain purchase price adjustments.

With this sale, there’s no more meeting at the combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell. (Which I guess was already true.)

Fortunately, we remain blessed with the combination KFC and Taco Bell—the KenTaco.

Pizza Hut is being purchased by LongRange Capital, which also owns 24 Hour Fitness and sells caskets, “which is either a coincidence or the most complete business plan ever written.”

Maanvi Singh, The Guardian:

On his last day hosting CBS’s The Late Show, Stephen Colbert played one of the most iconic songs from the Peanuts soundtrack.

“Oh no! I hope this doesn’t cost CBS any money!” he joked, as Louis Cato and the Great Big Joy Machine performed the song, titled Linus and Lucy, on air. It was a final dig at the network, which many fans believe cancelled the show due to Colbert’s criticisms of the Trump administration.

It did, indeed, cost CBS. Lee Mendelson Film Productions, the California company that controls jazz pianist Vince Guaraldi’s famed Peanuts catalog and had become increasingly litigious over unauthorized uses of the music, announced it had reached a licensing agreement with CBS for an undisclosed amount. The production company said it would donate all proceeds to World Central Kitchen, the disaster-relief food non-profit founded by chef José Andrés.

One of my favorite moments during a show filled with great moments. And great outcome, too: everybody wins: Colbert, Mendelson Film, World Central Kitchen. Well, not CBS. CBS didn’t win, but it seems they got off lightly. You could say that they settled for Peanuts.

Karl Bode writes at The Fine Print*, and this headline is only the opening salvo in another banger, in case his last one wasn’t provocative enough:

Elon Musk is a hateful white supremacist cosplaying as a supergenius engineer.

I’m tempted to leave it there.

The SpaceX prospectus filed with the government is a colossal work of fiction, promising a utopian future that will never arrive and technology that will never exist, delivered by a man incapable of delivering it. The proposal utterly fabricates paths to profitability, and lies endlessly about foundational reality.

SpaceX itself, it should be clear, lost $5 billion last year. And while Musk’s actual engineers may have done some useful things for space innovation, the entire project is a financial dog; it’s a heavily-subsidized money pit propped up by utterly unworkable plans for Mars colonization and a cumbersome Starship rocket that routinely explodes, often due to Musk’s failure to understand engineering basics.

Bode then unloads on the “U.S. corporate press” which “lacks the integrity to tell the truth” and instead is focused on “propping up extraction class narratives surrounding unchecked wealth accumulation.”

Simply savage evisceration.

Karl Bode, writing for Techdirt:

Last week Elon Musk successfully conned America and U.S. regulators into signing off on his preposterous SpaceX IPO, which immediately generated Musk $75 billion by comically over-stating the value of SpaceX, xAI, and Starlink. Then bone-grafting the entire pile of bullshit to the U.S. economy and your retirement account under the pretense that space data centers and Mars colonization are just around the corner.

A handful of remaining useful journalists have repeatedly explained how xAI and Musk’s racist 5th place chatbot — which comprises the lion’s share of the ridiculous IPO valuation — is a gargantuan loser. Both SpaceX and xAI aren’t profitable and may never be, and the claims of Mars colonization and space data centers are unworkable bullshit designed to distract people with toddler-level critical thinking skills.

Anyway I’m sure it will go fine.

Bode focuses on the Starlink grift in this piece, noting the service is too expensive, difficult to scale, and capacity constrained—a niche option at best. None of which likely matters to Musk and other supporters who, Bode suggests, merely “hope it will prove to be a semi-useful backbone for a major pump and dump scheme.”

Aditya Soni, reporting for Reuters (possibly paywalled; try Reader mode):

Elon Musk’s SpaceX (SPCX.O) is buying the startup behind the popular AI coding agent Cursor, Anysphere, for $60 billion in an all-stock deal to boost its presence in the lucrative enterprise AI tools market. […]

Cursor is one of several Silicon Valley startups that have drawn waves of developers by using AI to automate coding, making it a key rival to market leaders Anthropic and OpenAI. But a lack of access to computing power has hampered Cursor’s growth. […]

In its IPO filing, the company had said Cursor’s access to developers’ data, including coding requests and design decisions, could help improve its AI models such as Grok.

If you use Cursor, it’s time to find an alternative.

Harrison Rich, San Francisco Chronicle, on Friday:

On Pride Night at Oracle Park, with the San Francisco Giants wearing special edition hats to represent the LGBTQ+ community, multiple players wrote Bible verses next to the team’s rainbow logo, while one chose to forgo wearing the cap entirely.

Starting pitcher Landen Roupp and reliever JT Brubaker wrote the Bible verse Genesis 9:12-16 on the caps they wore Friday night, the same passage that has been displayed by other players on their Pride Night hats during games.

Despicable anywhere, but especially in San Francisco, home to a massive LGBTQ+ community with enormous history throughout the city.

The Cron’s sports columnist Ann Killion, under the headline “Giants pitchers didn’t just deface Pride uniforms. They alienated their fans and city,” expands:

Like so much about hard right Christianity, the Bible verse that the players scrawled on their hats, to “reclaim” the rainbow, is being usurped in troubling ways. The Genesis verse reads:

“And God said, ‘This is the sign of the covenant I am making between me and you and every living creature with you, a covenant for all generations to come: I have set my rainbow in the clouds, and it will be the sign of the covenant between me and the earth. Whenever I bring clouds over the earth and the rainbow appears in the clouds, I will remember my covenant between me and you and all living creatures of every kind.”

Plenty of people who truly believe in a loving God would focus on the part about all living creatures of every kind.

All living creatures would include everybody, including LGBTQ people, a group of people who have been excluded and persecuted, who have been murdered — including in San Francisco — for simply existing, have found a measure of welcome and inclusion in small efforts like Pride Nights.

Killion rightfully asks:

Was manager Tony Vitello complicit in the protest? His starter, Roupp, wore a defaced cap. And then, in the bullpen parade of another disastrous game, every pitcher he turned to save one (Erik Miller) was also part of the Pride Night protest. Seems like a weird coincidence.

What about the owners? Cyd Zeigler at OutSports notes that the largest stake in the Giants is held by owner Charles B. Johnson, who’s donated millions of dollars to Republicans, “including anti-gay politicians like Sen. Steve Daines (R-MT), Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), Ted Cruz (R-TX), Paul LePage (R-ME) and many others.”

The team issued a mealy-mouthed statement about supporting the LGBTQ+ community, and the players were issued warnings by Major League Baseball, yet no one will face punishment.

The players should at least be benched for several games. Vitello, too. First, for allowing them to violate the team’s uniform and standards; and second, for playing them that night knowing they were planning to protest. If I were the owner, I’d look into releasing them. If they can’t handle wearing a rainbow baseball cap for a few hours, don’t play the game.

You may recall that California is trying to institute a one-time 5% tax on billionaires. Some of those absurdly wealthy folks started a Signal chat to kvetch and brainstorm opposition, which was then leaked to Emily Shugerman, The San Francisco Standard’s “Wealth & Power Reporter”:

At some point, a chat participant proposed an action more audacious than lobbying Gov. Gavin Newsom or funding an anti-tax measure: What if the group simply bought the signature-collecting company the union was using, then prohibited it from collecting more signatures?

“Of course, that’s what they would think,” said the person who had seen the messages. “That’s what you would do in business: If there’s an impediment, just buy it.”

The proposal was emblematic of the strategies the billionaire class has tested over the last eight months: unorthodox, expensive, and increasingly desperate. Since the union’s Billionaire Tax Act campaign was launched last fall, the tech elites have organized in secret, scheduling and aborting Zoom meetings, starting and deleting and uninviting members from group chats, and casually throwing tens of millions of dollars at whatever idea seems poised to defeat the initiative and scare the union into submission.

The billionaire argument against the wealth tax is that it will “[drive] out high net worth individuals, jobs, investment, and revenue” and “destroy innovation in California.” Yet I’m not seeing the value these billionaires supposedly bring to our state. The wealth they’ve accumulated isn’t being productively used—say, on housing, healthcare, or education—it’s just sitting there, growing, benefiting no one but themselves. They borrow against it, tax-free, to fund their lifestyles (and destroy media companies). If they gain economic value from the wealth, they should pay taxes on it.

Benjamin Mullin, writing for The New York Times (gift link):

Fox Corp., the parent company of Fox News and the Fox broadcast network, is buying the streaming company Roku for $22 billion, a major deal that would make the Murdoch media empire a formidable contender in the streaming wars. […]

It would give Fox Corp. a foothold in more than 100 million households that stream content using devices powered by Roku, whose distinctive black-and-purple remotes are common in living rooms around the world.

In 2024, Roku aggressively pushed a Terms of Service update that locked customers out of their devices until they agreed to the change, tested full-screen start-up ads in 2025, and a recently filed class-action lawsuit accuses the company of intentionally bricking its TVs via software updates. My (thankfully limited) experience with Roku was marred by crummy software and sluggish hardware.

It’s the perfect vessel for the sludge Fox “News” peddles.

Mr. Murdoch and Anthony Wood, Roku’s chief executive, explained the deal during a question-and-answer session with analysts on Monday, but investors didn’t seem immediately convinced. Fox’s stock fell 14 percent in morning trading.

Nobody buys a Roku device because they’re good. They buy them because they’re cheap and lack taste. Ditto this acquisition.

Howard Beck at The Ringer on the Knicks championship, and Finals MVP Jalen Brunson:

How do you calculate the weight of a 53-year championship drought? Or the hopes and dreams of 8 million New Yorkers? Or the burden of becoming their basketball savior? If you could measure it all, what would it look like? Feel like? Would it be too much? Would it be unbearable? […]

A franchise placed its trust in Brunson, Brunson placed his trust in his work, and now the Knicks—the New York freaking Knicks!—after decades of ridicule, scorn, and general dysfunction, are NBA champions once more, having vanquished Victor Wembanyama and a precocious Spurs cast that was just as relentless and feisty as the Knicks themselves. […]

“No pressure,” Brunson said late Saturday night, after he had scored every critical basket, granted every Knicks fan’s fondest wish, and seized the championship that had eluded them for more than a half century. “No pressure whatsoever.” He was talking broadly about becoming the Knicks’ franchise star. He might as well have been explaining how he’d rallied them once again, for what felt like the thousandth time in two months, to turn a potential loss into the most consequential Knicks victory in modern times.

A terrific profile of the Knicks, and of Brunson, a once-in-a-generation franchise player.

C.J. Holmes, New York Daily News:

For 53 years, the Knicks had history.

On Saturday night, Jalen Brunson gave them the present.

The wait ended at Frost Bank Center, where the Knicks beat the San Antonio Spurs, 94–90, in Game 5 of the NBA Finals and won their first championship since 1973. It ended with Brunson at the center of everything, with Knicks fans roaring in San Antonio and with a franchise once buried under old punchlines leaving Texas with the trophy every generation before this one had chased.

Finally, the Knicks are champions again.

I grew up watching Knicks basketball during the Patrick Ewing era of the ’80s and ’90s, but haven’t followed the team since I fled the city in 1998, the year before they last made the NBA Finals. I’ve never known a Knicks championship. It’s a surreal experience to feel joy for a franchise you once loved passionately but haven’t thought about in almost three decades.

Congratulations to the Knicks and to New Yorkers (and former New Yorkers) everywhere. You deserve this.

(I checked and yes, this is the first time I’ve ever linked to the NY Daily News. It won’t become a habit.)

Chris Geidner at Law Dork, following the removal of Trump’s name from The Kennedy Center:

Everything about the six-month naming fight, though, is a perfect illustration of what the Trump administration does, what fighting back looks like, and how we win.

After a retrospective of the “lawless act” of adding Trump’s name to the building, Geidner offers seven “lessons to take from the Kennedy Center debacle […] essential to understanding how we get out of this moment and, in particular, how we move forward while Trump remains in power.” Three stood out:

• First: Stand up, speak out, and challenge them. [Rep. Joyce] Beatty’s lawsuit, like so many over the past 17 months, was the result of a person who thought the Trump administration did wrong and lawyers willing to back that person up in that fight.
• Sixth: Celebrate the wins. They purported to change the name, it was despised and also illegal, Beatty sued, the lawyers did their job, the judges did as well, and — after an absurd 48 hours — they took down his name. Take the W.
• Seventh: Get up the next day, and start it all over again.

The system, as slow and broken and corrupt as it is, can still work.

Fatima Al-Kassab and Frank Langfitt, reporting for NPR:

Workers have taken down President Donald Trump’s name from the Kennedy Center, hours after a court-ordered Friday deadline to remove it from the building, and less than six months after it was first affixed to the iconic performing arts venue. The removal of the more than a dozen bronze letters followed a judge’s ruling that the Center could not be renamed without Congressional approval. […]

Workers erected scaffolding on Friday around the section of the building where Trump’s name had been added in December 2025. Then, in a pre-dawn operation, the laborers draped the scaffolding in tarpaulin, before removing the giant metallic letters. […]

Hundreds of people braved the rain and thunderstorms overnight to document the take-down. Some heckled those involved for hiding the removal using tarpaulin – with shouts of “Cover up!” and “Cowards!”

A tarp was also used during installation, yet it somehow perfectly exemplifies the Trump regime’s need to obfuscate and avoid scrutiny.

Also, it must absolutely chap Donnie’s hide to watch people celebrating the removal of his name from a building. I hope he remains lucid long enough to see his entire eponymous empire crumble before him.

Sam Stevenson, Newsweek:

Moments after Governor Greg Abbott finished speaking in Houston on June 12, Paige—an African elephant, the world’s largest land mammal—was led into the convention hall draped in campaign messaging. While passing delegates and the media, the fully grown, 9-foot-tall elephant abruptly stopped and relieved herself, as seen in videos posted on social media.

OK, universe, we get it.

Anthropic, on Tuesday, June 9:

Today we’re launching Claude Fable 5: a Mythos-class model that we’ve made safe for general use.

Fable 5’s capabilities exceed those of any model we’ve ever made generally available. It is state-of-the-art on nearly all tested benchmarks of AI capability, showing exceptional performance in software engineering, knowledge work, vision, scientific research, and many other areas. The longer and more complex the task, the larger Fable 5’s lead over our other models.

Releasing a model this capable comes with risks. Without safeguards, Fable 5’s capabilities in areas like cybersecurity could be misused to cause serious damage. We’ve therefore launched the model with safeguards that mean queries on some topics will instead receive a response from our next-most-capable model, Claude Opus 4.8. To release the model both safely and quickly, we’ve tuned these safeguards conservatively—they’ll sometimes catch harmless requests, though they trigger, on average, in less than 5% of sessions. With more capable models arriving in the coming months, we’re working to improve our safeguards and reduce false positives as quickly as we can.

Anthropic, on Friday, June 12:

The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees. The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance. Access to all other Anthropic models will not be affected.

We received the directive from the government today at 5:21pm (ET). The letter did not provide specific details of its national security concern. Our understanding is that the government believes it has become aware of a method of bypassing, or “jailbreaking” Fable 5. We reviewed a demonstration of this specific technique being used to identify a small number of previously known, minor vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities all appear relatively simple, and we have found that other publicly-available models are able to discover them as well without requiring a bypass. […]

We are complying with the government’s legal directive and are removing access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all users. However, we disagree that the finding of a narrow potential jailbreak should be cause for recalling a commercial model deployed to hundreds of millions of people. If this standard was applied across the industry, we believe it would essentially halt all new model deployments for all frontier model providers.

A small number of people claim to have used these models, but most people have never seen them. These models might be a… what’s the word? It’s on the tip of my tongue.

I jest, of course. This governmental action seems quite unusual, and is seemingly unprecedented. Anthropic is claiming the purported jailbreak is available in OpenAI’s GPT 5.5—which hasn’t been pulled—raising the spectre of possible government interference or retaliation.

For the last several hours, MSNow has been live-streaming the façade of The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts as workers prepare to remove Donald J. Trump’s name from the building on the order of a judge last month. It must be removed by midnight Eastern time (9 p.m. Pacific) tonight, following a denied last-minute appeal. (Trump’s name has already been removed from the Kennedy Center website and stationery.)

When I first tuned in (about 2:45 p.m. Pacific time), there were about 27,000 people watching. As I publish this shortly before 9 p.m. Pacific, it’s over 89,000. I suspect it’ll hit 100,000 shortly. The stream has mostly shown construction workers hand-erecting scaffolding. A large crowd has grown around the Center, and as the workers progress, there are sporadic eruptions of applause and cheers (“Take it down!” is a popular refrain). Never before have I seen construction workers celebrated as heroes.

As of this writing, the workers and scaffolding are at the height of Trump’s name. They’re almost at the point where they can start removing the letters in Trump’s name. I anticipate the cheers will grow louder once the first letters come down and become positively deafening when they’re all gone.

I suspect this will be the first of many detrumpifications we see over the next few years.

A nation’s healing begins.

Ben Steverman, writing for Bloomberg Businessweek in February, reflects on how Americans reacted to the wealth of John D. Rockefeller, the world’s first billionaire (main link to Apple News+; Bloomberg subscribers; Internet Archive):

The Rockefellers and other industrialists faced fierce backlash — and politicians in both parties acted on it. In 1903, a Democratic congressman from Indiana proposed “to condemn as a public nuisance and a public peril” anyone worth more than $10 million, with the government confiscating the rest. President Theodore Roosevelt launched a legal assault on the “trusts,” including Standard Oil, and urged an estate tax on “those swollen fortunes which it is certainly of no benefit to this country to perpetuate.” […]

For rich Americans like the Rockefellers, the transition from the first Gilded Age to the Progressive Era was harrowing. By the early 1900s, Rockefeller was one of the most hated men in America, after muckraking journalists exposed the cutthroat tactics he had deployed building Standard Oil.

Elon Musk, the world’s first trillionaire, is likewise detested. The Rockefellers managed to reform their image by donating vast sums:

The Rockefellers leveraged their fortune in other ways. Saying he wanted his money used “for the benefit of mankind,” Senior gave $540 million to charity in his lifetime, mostly to the Rockefeller Foundation and other grantmaking organizations under his son’s control. Another $500 million went to his family, almost all to Junior, who went on to donate $537 million himself […].

Lists of small Rockefeller donations fill thousands of pages in the archives, while major beneficiaries include the University of Chicago, Spelman College, Rockefeller University, the Acadia and Grand Teton national parks, the Museum of Modern Art and the Met Cloisters museum in uptown Manhattan. Rockefeller grants transformed the social sciences, the study of public health and especially medical research, eradicating diseases and funding several medical schools, including the Peking Union Medical College. The builder of the (for-profit) Rockefeller Center, Junior particularly loved ambitious construction projects, such as the restorations of Colonial Williamsburg, the Palace of Versailles and the cathedral at Reims. Junior also ensured the United Nations would be headquartered in New York by donating the tract of land along the East River where it sits.

Can you imagine the anti-Black-woman Musk donating to a historically Black women’s college? I don’t expect we’ll see such acts of largess from Musk, who has always struck me as anti-intellectual, tasteless, and lacking in joy.

Ryan Mac and Ben Casselman, reporting for The New York Times (gift link):

Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire on Friday.

The tech mogul reached that milestone when shares of his rocket company SpaceX began trading on the stock market, opening at $150, signaling a new era of ultra-affluence and widening wealth inequality.

We never figured out how to solve the billionaire problem, so now we have a trillionaire—and one of the most atrocious persons in the world, to boot.

We’ll need to update this tee shirt.

Disney reimagined Soarin’ Across America for America’s 250th celebration and Disney Unscripted goes behind the scenes:

From capturing stunning aerial footage over a tapestry of diverse American landscapes to crafting an all-new musical arrangement of the iconic Soarin’ score, see how filmmakers, musicians, and Imagineers worked together to bring this next chapter to life. You’ll also get an inside look at how each scene is designed and fine-tuned through ride testing to create the smooth, immersive sensation of flight.

I’d rank Soarin’ as one of my top two or three favorite Disney rides (along with Rise of the Resistance and Indiana Jones Adventure). This glimpse of how it’s programmed—acceleration curves, wind effects, scents, music—gave me an even deeper appreciation for the magic.

The Imagineers even used Apple Vision Pro headsets to reduce the amount of physical hardware they needed to take up with them on the ride, using (what I presume to be) Mac Virtual Display. Megan Duncan, a senior sound engineer/mixer, explained (while wearing a Vision Pro):

So usually for a Soarin’ attraction we need to build scaffolding, but that was a no-can-do for this project because we were on such an accelerated schedule. So [senior manager for Audio Media Design] Greg [Lhotka] had the brilliant idea of using screens in a digital space. I don’t have to bring up a bunch of screens, and I just use this mouse and keyboard to control it through Bluetooth in my headset. Now, we can actually be in the carriage, mixing in the carriage instead of having to lug up a bunch of things onto a scaffolding or lift.

People keep dismissing Vision Pro, but it’s found a niche as a highly portable large- and multi-screen environment.

From The Oscars news portal:

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced today that its Board of Governors voted to present Academy Honorary Awards to actor Glenn Close, animator Floyd Norman and director Ridley Scott, and the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award to producers Christine Vachon and Pamela Koffler. […]

“The Academy’s Board of Governors is thrilled to present this year’s Governors Awards to five remarkable individuals whose groundbreaking work has forever shaped the art of filmmaking,” said Academy President Lynette Howell Taylor.

I’m happy for Close, Scott, Vachon, and Koffler, but it’s Floyd Norman for whom I’m absolutely ecstatic.

Floyd Norman is the legendary animator who has broken barriers and inspired generations of artists over his remarkable career. […]

An animator and storyboard artist, Norman began his esteemed 65-year career at Walt Disney Animation Studios in 1956, becoming the studio’s first Black animator. His first Disney feature film was “Sleeping Beauty,” and he contributed to such classic feature films as “The Sword in the Stone,” “Mary Poppins,” “The Jungle Book” and “Robin Hood,” as well as the short films “Donald in Mathmagic Land,” “Goliath II” and “Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree.” Norman’s other notable film credits include “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” “Mulan,” “Toy Story 2” and “Monsters, Inc.”

I’ve mentioned Norman before; he spoke at Apple a decade ago at the screening of his 2016 documentary, Floyd Norman: An Animated Life, and I thought he was a true delight. I’m thrilled he’s being recognized by the Academy for his lifetime of achievements. Congratulations to him (and all of the honorees).

(Via Robert Cheng’s pointer to Disney Animation’s Instagram post.)

Allison Johnson at The Verge tried the new Siri AI:

Siri AI working well depends a lot on the AI understanding context. So far, it’s doing pretty well. I asked it when I needed to return some camera gear I rented for WWDC, and it found the information from a calendar event I’d made and in an email (it’s due back Friday, for the record). Likewise, prompting it with something like “add these events to my calendar” will consistently trigger it to reference the information on my screen. So far, so good.

“So far, so good” was also the gist of Joanna Stern’s verdict during John Gruber’s The Talk Show Live event on Tuesday evening.

(I’m still in the waiting line for the new Siri, 48 hours later. I’m not bitter, nope.)

As a conversationalist, new Siri also seems a bit more dispassionate than Gemini. I gave them both the same prompt asking why the flowers in front of my house seemed to be wilting. They both gave wordy responses with a lot of possible causes, but Gemini’s started with “That is incredibly frustrating…” where Siri was more direct and got right into diagnosing the situation.

That alone is a reason to use Siri AI over other chatbots. I’m not a fan of the sycophancy and faux humanism.

Apple Newsroom, in an announcement introducing “innovative features and intelligence experiences across services”:

Coming this fall, users will have more control over how they share their location with friends and family using Find My, with new options to share for a custom duration — either for a number of minutes, hours, or days — or even set a date and time for when sharing will stop. This makes it easy for users to share their location while attending an event, or for a long weekend getaway with friends and family.

Finally.

It was only this past weekend that my wife and I were lamenting the limited options offered for sharing location when traveling with friends. “For One Hour,” “Until End of Day,” or “Indefinitely” were always woefully insufficient. I’ve never understood the logic behind those three choices.

There are handful of other new features enhancing various Apple service, including Enhanced Flyover and Local Lists in Maps; Apple Cash bill splitting, and creating passes from physical cards in Wallet; and video “podcasts” on macOS and tvOS and improved search in the Podcast app. iCloud Shared Albums also adds full-resolution sharing (yay!) and enables non-Apple users to join contribute photos.

Apple Newsroom, again:

New App Store capabilities rolling out this year will give developers more flexibility to market their apps, acquire new users, and offer brand-new business models for Apple In-App Purchase.

One of those capabilities:

The new Asset Library helps developers move faster across marketing workflows, with one place in App Store Connect to manage all Creative Assets, app preview videos, and screenshots. Developers can reuse assets across custom product pages and In-App Events, eliminating redundant uploads and streamlining their promotional campaigns across the App Store. Developers can also submit assets for App Review approval independent of an app update, ideal for rolling out seasonal imagery or coordinating with an Apple Ads campaign without delay.

Managing and uploading the same assets for multiple devices across multiple storefronts is a huge pain the ass for developers. I suspect this will be cheered loudly by the community, as will this:

[…] new App Store Bundles will give developers the ability to partner together and offer users more for less. By expanding beyond a single-developer catalog, these new bundles will allow users to subscribe to multiple favorite apps from different developers at a better price. Developers will also be able to create Suites, offering subscription packages that aren’t available as standalone purchases.

I’m excited for multi-developer bundles, though I wonder how developers will manage the revenue split.

I’m less excited about this:

To complement these new marketing capabilities, the App Store is getting new ways to connect users with experiences they are looking for. To help more people find apps and games they will love, the App Store will introduce new Personalized Collections based on user interests, along with App Notes that explain why specific apps are recommended. These tailored recommendations can appear on the Apps, Games, and Search tabs, evolving over time based on a user’s app usage and downloads.

Translation: We’re tracking more of what you do.

Lastly, under “Streamlined Submissions” to App Review, is this:

To further simplify the development and submission process, apps and games on the Mac App Store no longer require Intel support. This allows developers to ship Apple silicon-only binaries, eliminating the need to maintain multiple builds.

That’s one benefit of dropping Intel support in macOS 27, but I’m shedding a tear because one of the earliest decisions we made on the Mac App Review team was to require universal binaries for submissions. At the time it was to ensure support for the nascent Apple silicon Macs and now we’re bidding farewell to Intel Macs. How far we’ve come.

Also today in Apple Newsroom:

Apple today introduced Siri AI, an entirely new version of Siri, powered by Apple Intelligence. A profoundly more capable and conversational assistant with personal context understanding, broad world knowledge, and onscreen awareness, Siri AI can help users find what they need in the moment, from answering questions from the web on virtually any topic, to surfacing relevant information from a user’s personal messages, emails, photos, and more. Siri AI also includes a dedicated app for users to revisit conversations across their products, an expanded Visual Intelligence experience, and integrated tools for writing. With a bold new architecture uniquely designed to protect users’ privacy, Siri AI leverages the next generation of Apple Intelligence to bring state-of-the-art understanding and reasoning, along with powerful systemwide capabilities, to Apple’s operating systems. These features are available for developer testing starting today, and will be available as a beta to users later this year.

This looks to be most of what Apple promised in 2024, though without any mention of the most ambitious functionality demoed back then (by Kelsey Peterson, who recently left Apple for OpenAI.)

I’m also surprised that Apple rebranded as “Siri AI.” I understand there’s too much brand equity in “Siri” to abandon it completely, yet a strong desire to distinguish it from the embarrassment that is the current version, but tacking on “AI” seems incongruent (and sounds weird when spoken).

This “profoundly more capable” Siri is currently gated behind a “Try New Siri” waitlist in the first beta (under Settings > Siri, not, curiously, “Apple Intelligence and Siri,” as it is in iOS 26). I’ve joined and I’m impatiently awaiting my turn.

(If you’re an iOS or iPadOS user in the European Union, you’ll have to exercise greater patience, because Apple is delaying the launch of Siri AI in the EU because of the Digital Markets Act.)

Apple Newsroom:

Today, during the Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple previewed its upcoming software releases that will deliver the next generation of Apple Intelligence and introduce Siri AI, an entirely new version of Siri that is profoundly more intelligent, knowledgeable, and capable. The releases also bring powerful and intuitive new features to help parents create safe digital experiences for kids, as well as improvements that further elevate the software design and performance of Apple products while making them more responsive, delightful, and easier to use with iOS 27, iPadOS 27, macOS 27, watchOS 27, visionOS 27, and tvOS 27.

Poor tvOS gets no overview.

The WWDC26 Keynote and Platform State of the Union videos are also available. (The Keynote is for the general public, SOTU for the developers.)

I’m still formulating my thoughts, but my initial reaction is two-fold:

One, the Keynote itself felt light—not exactly “content-free,” but it didn’t adhere to the packed-to-the-gills formula we’ve come to expect in the event’s prerecorded era. There were no over-the-top opening skits, fanciful location transitions, bento boxes crammed with features, or interminable per-OS technology tours. SOTU felt more substantial (yet surprisingly disconnected from the Keynote).

Two, OS 27 has the earmarks of what longtime Apple-heads would approvingly call a “Snow Leopard release”: a focus on fit and finish, with a relatively small set of new features. I’m excited enough for it that I’ve already installed developer beta 1 (on a sacrificial iPhone and Apple ID, of course).

Anna-Lee Craig’s entry in Dallas Taylor’s ongoing Hamilton sound series deserves its own post, rather than being lost in a “See Also.” Craig, or “ALC” as she’s called, is the show’s A2 (Assistant Audio Engineer). She reveals—

[…] the intricate world of Broadway microphone craft. From custom-built head rigs made with galvanized steel and fly-fishing line to mics hidden inside the crowns, every piece of the audio setup is hand-fitted to each performer for a nearly invisible fit. [She] walks through the signal chain from transmitter to mixing console, the transition from head-worn mics to booms for the women’s ensemble, and what it means to be the mechanic changing wheels while the bus keeps rolling.

ALC is responsible for fitting and caring for all of the performers’ mics. The custom-built, hand-fitted head rigs are her handiwork—known on the production as “an ALC special.” She exudes such extreme competence, immeasurable warmth, and unbounded joy that I got quite the Kaylee-from-Firefly vibe, to the point where I want to call her “A-Lee.”

Dallas Taylor (Twenty Thousand Hertz) just dropped another fantastic video, “How Hamilton Is Mixed Live on Broadway,” with Justin Rathbun, Hamilton’s front-of-house sound engineer at the Richard Rodgers Theatre. Rathbun, who’s been with Hamilton for ten and a half years, details the show’s incredibly complex audio setup, from the board programming to the speakers.

(One amusing detail: the El Gato Stream Deck used to control the 14-plus computers has a bank of buttons with various messages programmed in. Along with the expected responses (“OK,” “Copy that,” “LOL”) was “I need a drink.” I chuckled.)

Two things blew my mind.

One was line-by-line mixing. Rathbun raises and lowers faders on a per-line basis to hide breaths, eliminate cross-mic pickup, and “keep the sound as clean as possible.” It requires deep familiarity with the show and the performers, along with intense concentration to adjust in the moment to minute performance changes. Seeing Rathbun’s fingers flit across the mixing console was like watching a virtuoso musician at work.

The second was cue-based audio delays. To start, millisecond delays are introduced into the audio output to ensure aural consistency throughout the theatre, explains Rathbun:

Our approach is that the sound coming off the stage should arrive at the seat at the same time as the sound from the speakers is also arriving at the seat.

These delays are needed to account for the speed of sound. Pretty standard fare in professional theatre productions. Then things get wild:

In addition to that, we are also using channel delay during the show on a per-cue basis. We are changing the delays on every particular microphone, depending on where they are on stage.

So for instance, we can look at “Hamilton A” and we can look at our delay time, right? So right now he is at a 5-millisecond delay time; so he’s up stage standing behind the chair; when he walks down stage—so I have a cue here that says “Ham sits”—he will walk down stage literally two and a half feet, and this delay time is now going to change to “2”; we wanted to get the same timing between what’s coming out of his mouth and what’s hitting the audience at the same time. We have timed it out to that close.

Rathbun’s pride in this level of detail is quite evident—and deservedly so.

This is the latest in Taylor’s Hamilton sound series, and they continue to delight me.

See Also: “Where Hamilton hides its mics,” featuring Anna-Lee Craig, the show’s A2, who “walks through the signal chain from transmitter to mixing console, the transition from head-worn mics to booms for the women’s ensemble, and what it means to be the mechanic changing wheels while the bus keeps rolling.”

The United States Postal Service, a week ago:

The Mister Rogers stamp, originally released in 2018, is new again in 2026!

In national Stamp Encore polling, the stamp honoring the television host beloved by generations rose to the top spot from a varied ballot of 25 previous stamp issuances.

The Stamp Encore contest was the first of its kind, asking the public to vote on a favorite stamp from the past to reissue in 2026. The contest saw nearly 600,000 votes, with the Mister Rogers stamp winning by more than 40,000 votes over its next closest contender.

I’m a huge fan of Mister Rogers (the person and the show). Naturally I purchased a few items. (The imperforate press sheet will look great framed.)

Rogers was “a passionately loyal postal customer and a huge advocate for the power of mail,” says Isaac Cronkhite, USPS’ chief processing and distribution officer, making his stamp selection especially apropos:

The esteem shown for Mister Rogers in Stamp Encore balloting seems fitting; Fred Rogers sometimes replied to 100 letters per day, never resorting to form letters. “I care deeply about sending a personal response,” Rogers wrote in a book about his postal correspondence. “It gives me a way to know my television neighbors as real people and to make a more personal connection with them.”

Finally, I’m finding it hard to read this apolitically:

“Fred Rogers is the embodiment of a good person and saw good qualities in everyone,” says Derry Noyes, creator of the 2018 stamp design. “We are in need of such human beings in this world. I believe that is why this stamp won the competition.” […]

“I respect Fred Rogers more than ever for his ability to connect with people,” she says. “He wasn’t judgmental and made a point of spreading that mentality through example. In this day and age perhaps I’m a bit nostalgic for his way of treating people and confronting adversity without vitriol.” She muses, “We could all use a bit more of the Fred Rogers mindset.”

Sopan Deb, writing for The New York Times (gift link):

Anthony Head, the British actor who rose from the smooth 1980s pitchman for Nescafe Gold Blend instant coffee to become a mainstay performer on influential television shows like “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and “Ted Lasso,” has died. He was 72.

The cause was “complications due to pneumonia,” his daughters, the actresses Emily Head and Daisy Head, said in a statement released to the BBC on Friday.

I absolutely adored Head’s Giles in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. He was nerdy, dangerous, and caring, all at once. I remember my utter delight that Head’s character in Ted Lasso was named “Rupert,” in a nod to his rarely spoken first name in Buffy.

It was only yesterday that we were listening to the soundtrack for the Buffy musical episode, Once More, with Feeling. On top of everything else, Head was a terrific singer.

R.I.P., Ripper.

Plus: Remembrances from Buffy and Ted Lasso costars.

Wynton Marsalis is a tremendous musician and, it turns out, a terrific lecturer and educator:

In April 2011, Wynton Marsalis launched “Hidden in Plain View: Meanings in American Music,” a three-year performance and lecture series at Harvard University. The six lecture series began with “Music as Metaphor,” an interpretation of the many unobserved symbols in American music and their illumination of the democratic process, and featured performances by Marsalis alongside Ali Jackson (drums), Dan Nimmer (piano), Walter Blanding (tenor sax), Carlos Henriquez (bass), James Chirillo (guitar and banjo), and Mark O’Connor (violin).

I’ve been meaning to link to this fantastic—and new to me!—playlist for a few weeks now. Two hours of musical (and American) history education over twenty-five videos. Set some time aside for this one. It’s an absolute delight. You won’t be disappointed.

(This is the first of six lectures Marsalis gave at Harvard, but I’ve only been able to find this and Lecture #4: At the Speed of Instinct online. If you know of links to the others, please share.)

I quietly pointed to this report on behavioral tracking from NeuroLaunch in my link-up to Apple “Clingers,” but it deserves greater visibility.

Behavioral tracking is the practice of collecting and analyzing data about everything you do online, every page you visit, every ad you pause on, every search you type, to build predictive profiles that can be used to target, personalize, and influence your behavior. It’s not a background detail of the modern internet. It is the modern internet’s business model, and it shapes far more of your daily experience than most people ever realize.

For example:

The same systems that keep you scrolling also keep you in an attentive, emotionally activated state, which makes you more responsive to advertising. Behavioral data tells the algorithm not just what to show you, but when your state makes you most likely to act.

Research has shown that digital records of behavior can predict personal characteristics, including political views, sexual orientation, and personality traits, with accuracy that far exceeds what most users would consider possible from their public activity alone. Fewer than 70 Facebook Likes proved sufficient to outperform coworkers in predicting a person’s personality on standard psychological measures. That’s not a hypothetical future capability. That research is over a decade old.

This is one (of many) reasons I rarely engage with Facebook posts (I use it primarily as an outlet to share links to JAG’s Workshop), why I never post to (and rarely read) Instagram, and why my primary social media footprint is on Mastodon, where there is no algorithm trying to force-feed me posts it thinks I will like.

Apple launched a new spot in its “Privacy. That’s iPhone” campaign, this one focusing on the data trackers that follow you as you browse the web, and Safari’s features that block them. Via the TBWA\Media Arts Lab LinkedIn account:

“Clingers,” directed by Ivan Zacharias, brings online data trackers to life as chrome-suited figures who physically latch onto people everywhere they browse, obsessively following them until Safari blocks them out. A companion digital execution, “Tracker Invasion,” takes it further, placing those trackers inside actual media outlets watching users browse in real time.

The new campaign continues Apple’s more than seven-year effort to raise awareness around the value of keeping user data secure and reinforces its longstanding belief that privacy is a fundamental human right.

It’s a fun spot (“Oh, chrome.”), though I’m not sure how effective Safari’s privacy features are in the face of egregiously aggressive tracking. I’m also not willing to find out how much worse it could be if I disabled those features.

Online behavioral tracking isn’t just about showing you “more relevant” ads; it’s a serious privacy issue. It can be used to build up a detailed profile about you based on your web surfing habits. It can also be used by the government to track your location. Online privacy shouldn’t be browser-dependent. Tracking should be banned.

Warren P. Strobel and Lauren Kaori Gurley, writing for The Washington Post (gift link courtesy of Bluesky posters):

President Donald Trump on Tuesday announced he was appointing Bill Pulte as acting director of national intelligence, tapping a staunch political supporter who heads a federal mortgage regulation agency but has no intelligence experience.

Strobel and Gurley could have ended that sentence one word earlier.

The 2004 law establishing ODNI says that anyone "nominated for appointment as Director of National Intelligence shall have extensive national security expertise.”

Pulte has “no time in the military. No time in Congress. No time in the diplomatic corps. No time in law enforcement,” Sen. Mark R. Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said at a hearing Tuesday. “It is an insult.”

Pulte is profoundly unqualified for the role but exhibits deep loyalty to Trump —two traits Trump requires when doling out jobs.

Brian Stelter, reporting this utterly unsurprising news for CNN:

CBS News fired veteran “60 Minutes” correspondent Scott Pelley on Tuesday, one day after he sharply criticized the newsmagazine’s new leadership in front of the staff.

CBS News editor in chief Bari Weiss said Wednesday that her leadership team had tried to reconcile with Pelley, but “we weren’t able to do so.” The correspondent said that wasn’t true, reaffirming that he will not go quietly from the network where he worked for 37 years.

I knew Pelley was done for as soon as I read that he’d accused Weiss during a staff meeting with newly hired executive producer Nick Bilton of “murdering” 60 Minutes—a meeting in which Pelley also accused both Weiss and Bilton of lacking qualifications for their jobs.

A few hours later, in a Tuesday evening letter to Pelley, Bilton wrote that Pelley’s “antipathy to the future of the show has come through loud and clear. And I have heard you.”

Bilton’s letter states he fired Pelley “for cause” (and “misconduct”), language specifically crafted, no doubt, to allow CBS News to weasel its way out of paying whatever was left on Pelley’s contract. I suspect a breach of contract and wrongful dismissal lawsuit will be forthcoming from Pelley’s lawyers, followed quickly by a confidential agreement in which CBS News admits no wrongdoing but Pelley’s bank account finds itself several million dollars larger.

60 Minutes is the number one news program on television but I doubt that remains true for much longer. Though I haven’t watched regularly in decades (I’m usually drawn in by specific segments), I’ve trusted their reporting to be accurate and truthful. Since Weiss was installed, that’s no longer assured.

Two full-time correspondents now remain: Lesley Stahl and Bill Whitaker. I don’t see how they continue with the program following Pelley’s termination. Both should walk away in solidarity with Pelley—and with all who were fired or resigned under Weiss—though I suspect that’s exactly what Bilton, Weiss, and David Ellison (owner of parent company Paramount Skydance) want. The fewer people who care about what 60 Minutes stood for, the easier it is to twist it into a MAGA mouthpiece.

After today, it’s safe to pronounce the 60 Minutes program we’ve known for nearly 60 years “dead”—murdered by Weiss (and Bilton). We’re just waiting for the funeral.

I thoroughly enjoyed this Steve Jobs interview from 1992 in NeXTWORLD (via Computer Ads from the Past). The introduction describes him as “by turns evangelical, combative, and reflective”—which is to say, Steve.

A few choice passages (the interviewer is Dan Ruby):

Why is custom apps such a potent idea?

Getting applications written is the number one problem in corporate American information technology. And even though we’re downsizing to client-server computing and the apps are on the desktop, the bottleneck is still getting them written.

This is even more true when customers want to use computers for operational productivity as opposed to management productivity. You can’t buy shrinkwrapped software to do stock trading or run your hospital or do order processing. You’ve got to write custom apps. Now, in the past, these operational applications were written in COBOL or some more modern language on a mainframe or minicomputer. Starting in the very late ‘80s, some companies started downsizing to client-server computing. They could buy a Sun and spend like two years writing a good app, or as good as you could write on a Sun. Now, we roll in and say, look, you can write that custom app five to ten times faster on a NeXT.

I wonder if Steve would be bullish on AI vibe coding as a way to accelerate and democratize app creation, or if it’d be anathema to him because of the slop potential.

Steve also takes swipes at Sun Microsystems, Microsoft, Taligent, and even Apple:

How about Apple? And not as a competitor, but from your unique perspective. How are they doing?

Well, I think that anybody who’s managing to survive and grow a little bit in this environment is doing well, so I would say Apple’s doing okay. I think that Apple wants to be the consumer-products company for computers. As an example, PowerBooks are very good iMacintoshes but the Quadras are terrible. So it’s obvious that Apple is putting its best people on the low end of their line, and their high end is withering. Look, they basically sold Taligent. They took Pink, which was an internal Apple technology, and basically threw it out.

Well, they spun it off into a new company.

Right, which is not what you do with your company jewels. So from my point of view, Apple was at a fork in the road for a long time, and they finally chose a path of becoming the Sony of computers. That’s probably an excellent choice for Apple, but it means that there are going to be a certain number of people at the high end of Apple’s market that are over time going to feel disenfranchised.

This was seven years after Steve was ousted from Apple, and five years before he returned with the NeXT acquisition. He was right about Apple’s laser focus on the consumer (which became only more true with him back at the helm) and the effective abandonment of its highest-end customers.

Also “PowerBooks,” “Quadras,” and “Macintoshes”? I’m cringing from the rampant pluralization (as is everyone in Apple Product Marketing).

Lastly, I presume “iMacintoshes” is one hell of a transcription error. Either that, or Steve was already contemplating new Apple product names.

Steve even tackles politics, specifically Ross Perot’s presidential candidacy:

I think he’s got a real chance and I’m helping him every way I can. […] I think Ross would be an excellent president.

Why?

Leadership. He chooses very good people around him, and he is able to distill out of his troops and himself a clear vision. Then he’s able to articulate that vision well to a large number of people.

What’s wrong with our country is that we haven’t put the energy or resources into developing our collective values. We have to take some time and ask, “What are the ten most important things that we want to do as owners of this country?” and then go figure out how to do them.

For as long as I can remember, the only real leader that was able to communicate a vision was John F. Kennedy. I remember watching him on TV when I was six, seven, eight years old. When he said let’s put a man on the moon and bring him back in this decade, that was a vision that a scientist, an historian, and a gas station attendant could understand, each in his own way.

People change, but I imagine Steve would be a lot less enthusiastic about Donald Trump.

John Gruber (again):

The annual live audience episode of The Talk Show during the week of WWDC.

Tuesday, June 9 at 7pm at the California Theater in San Jose, CA.

I’ve purchased my ticket—my first live show, surprisingly. (I was often busy that day). Look for me if you’re there.

For ten years, Gruber’s special guests were Apple’s most senior executives. That changed last year. Will a newly-annoited CEO-in-waiting restart the tradition or will Joanna Stern and Nilay Patel make a return appearance?

John Gruber, at Daring Fireball:

You know what a dickover is, even if you didn’t know what to call it (until now). If you use the Internet, you encounter them every day. They’re popovers, but dickheaded. The web is absolutely lousy with them, and mobile apps present them too, with increasing frequency.

Dickovers are a veritable scourge. They’re so common they’re effectively part of the firmament.

Reload the page a few times (and press the Escape or Enter keys) for a chuckle.

“Dickover” isn’t the most polite term, but certainly captures the experience. Like Gruber, I intensely dislike these screen-blocking abominations, especially the ones warning me that I’m using an ad blocker. The more respectful of these offer a “Continue” button (though often a snide and passive-aggressive “Continue without supporting us”). The truly heinous refuse to allow you to view their content at all—to which I say, fuck you, and close the window (or view in Reader mode or with JavaScript disabled while I laugh uproariously at the utter incompetence).

It’s a goddamn privilege for anyone to bestow your article, story, or product page with their attention. The gall, to deliberately interrupt them while they are in the middle of actively reading, to present them with a dickover.

Here on JAG’s Workshop, I’ve studiously avoided the seemingly ubiquitous “Sign up for my newsletter” dickover because I’m more interested in having you read than having you subscribe (possibly to the detriment of my email subscriptions). I have a very small dickbar on the lower right edge encouraging you to Subscribe, which can sometimes obscure content on windows sized between 640px and 1100px wide. I plan on removing it in favor of a navigation item, so the site will be completely dick-free.

Bare Bones:

There are more than a hundred new feature additions, changes, and refinements, including forward-looking foundational work which brings order-of-magnitude performance improvements in some parts of the product.

I’ve been using BBEdit for its entire 30-plus year history (I was building websites with it in 1994). It’s by far my most-used third-party app. I would be lost without it. I updated immediately.

The headline new features include:

• Expanded Shortcuts support (“makes BBEdit’s powerful text transformations even more available to workflows outside of the application”).
• Search for text in images (“Multi-file search for text in images. Yes. Multi-file search for text in images using grep. Mmmhmmm.”)
• Color Customizations for Projects and Notebooks (“Help keep things straight using color as a guide, with the new ability to select a color scheme per-project (and per-Notebook).”)

As is tradition for Bare Bones, the release notes are extensive, detailing the plethora of changes in this update.

BBEdit 16 is a free upgrade for BBEdit 15 customers who purchased on or after November 1, 2025, and a paid upgrade for customers who bought before then ($29.99 for BBEdit 15 customers, $39.99 for BBEdit customers with 14.6.9 or earlier). It’s also available in the Mac App Store via subscription.

(Worth mentioning whether or not you’re in the market for a text editor: BBEdit offers one of the most generous free tiers I’ve seen in an app. A significant amount of BBEdit’s functionality can be used completely for free, including its powerful grep text manipulation. It’s a tool worth keeping handy.)

Robert D. McFadden, writing for The New York Times (gift link):

Clarence B. Jones, a confidant, lawyer and speechwriter for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. during the civil rights struggles of the 1960s, who helped plan the March on Washington and drafted part of Dr. King’s celebrated “I Have a Dream” speech, died on Friday in Cupertino, Calif. He was 95. […]

A brilliant organizer and a member of Dr. King’s inner circle, Mr. Jones planned protest campaigns; raised funds for Dr. King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference; and coordinated legal strategies to challenge discriminatory laws, defend arrested demonstrators and fight lawsuits against their leaders.

Along with his many other accomplishments, Jones hand-wrote the copyright symbol onto mimeographed copies of MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech and filed for formal copyright; from a 2013 SFGate article celebrating the 50th anniversary of the speech:

A few days after the speech, Jones filed a formal application for statutory copyright. […]

The copyright certificate was issued to Clarence B. Jones, Esq., but he signed it over to King and mailed it to his secretary, with a note attached reading, “Who knows, Dora. I doubt that it will have any economic importance but someday it could.”

Jones was a good lawyer. That tiny decision was worth millions to MLK’s estate.

Anthropic:

We’re upgrading Claude Opus to a new version: Claude Opus 4.8. It builds on Opus 4.7 with improvements across benchmarks, and is a more effective collaborator. It’s available today for the same price.

Opus 4.8 launches alongside several new features. Users on claude.ai now have control over the amount of effort Claude puts into a task. Claude Code has a new “dynamic workflows” feature that allows it to tackle very large-scale problems. And fast mode for Opus 4.8—where the model can work at 2.5× the speed—is now three times cheaper than it was for previous models.

I almost didn’t link up this announcement, but then I saw this:

One of the most prominent improvements in Opus 4.8 is its honesty. We train all our models to be honest—for instance, to avoid making claims that they can’t support. But a general problem with AI models is that they sometimes jump to conclusions, confidently claiming to have made progress in their work despite the evidence being thin. Early testers report that Opus 4.8 is more likely to flag uncertainties about its work and less likely to make unsupported claims. This is borne out in our evaluations, which show that Opus 4.8 is around four times less likely than its predecessor to allow flaws in code it has written to pass unremarked.

Earlier this week I was using Claude Sonnet 4.6 to assist with a technical investigation, and it made a massive assumption from the jump before spitting out nearly 700 words of completely wrong analysis. I don’t know that Claude Opus 4.8 would have avoided jumping to conclusions and taking a massively wrong path, but it’s fascinating that this “confidence” gap is being called out.

Anthropic:

Anthropic has raised $65 billion in Series H funding led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, and Sequoia Capital, valuing the company at $965 billion post-money.

That’s more than 150% higher than Anthropic’s February funding round, which valued it at $380 billion. CNBC reports that Anthropic’s valuation now exceeds that of OpenAI ($852 billion).

The forthcoming IPOs will need to be astronomical for investors to make their money back. Let’s see who’s left holding the bag.

Matthew Gribben, on the r/macpro sub-Reddit, describes his experience installing Ubuntu and a local LLM on a 2013 “trash can” Mac Pro with 64GB RAM and two D700 GPUs with 12GB total memory:

[…] I discovered that while its old southern islands based GPUs weren’t supported in ROCm, they were now supported under Vulkan — thanks to new drivers and a new Linux kernel.

That means it can run basically any model that llama cpp can throw at its 12gb of VRAM. Not a lot but it’s enough for some small models.

Gribben describes the results as “[n]ot exactly lightening fast but totally usable, especially for planning tasks where you can just set it and forget it.”

In his installation guide he writes:

The 2013 Mac Pro is still a strange machine: thermally dense, beautifully overbuilt, and awkwardly dependent on two workstation GPUs that most modern ML stacks have forgotten.

He also notes:

The point of the D700 is not that it wins benchmarks. It is that a sunk-cost workstation can still be a reliable local inference endpoint when the model is sized correctly and the Vulkan path is configured well.

There’s life still in the thermally challenged Mac Pro. If you happen to have one sitting idle, this seems like a fun project. (You can find the D700 configuration on eBay for around $300, though I wouldn’t recommend buying one just to run local LLMs—even at 2×–3× the price, an $800 Mac mini is still a better deal.)

Apple Newsroom, last Thursday:

This Saturday, May 23, Apple TV will present a special live Major League Soccer match captured exclusively on iPhone 17 Pro — marking the first time iPhone will be used to capture the entirety of a major professional live sporting event broadcast. […]

iPhone 17 Pro will capture live footage throughout the match, including team warmups on the pitch, player introductions, in-net goal angles, and the atmosphere inside the stadium. With cameras positioned throughout the venue, the broadcast will deliver the pristine video quality fans expect, alongside dynamic new perspectives that bring viewers closer to the action, made possible by the small form factor of iPhone.

Jeremy Gray at PetaPixel on Tuesday:

Now that the historic broadcast happened, it is worth taking another look to see not only how it went, but how Apple pulled off the impressive feat.

Fifteen iPhone 17 Pro Max devices, some connected to $265,000 Fujinon HZK 25–1000mm lenses (the massive broadcast lenses you’ve likely seen during many sporting events), but most simply using the built-in lenses. Video was shot using the Blackmagic Camera app in 1080p60 (not 4K, to my surprise). Gray links to Instagram posts from Apple, MLS, and others showing behind-the-scenes looks at the rigs.

The thing that struck me the most (other than shooting at 1080p) is that, outside a few specific situations, the results are effectively indistinguishable from a game shot using traditional cameras (and my guess is those quality issues might be mitigated by shooting in 4K). That didn’t stop people from well, actually-ing the setup, of course. (I’m convinced the complainers have never used an interchangeable lens SLR and don’t understand how cameras work.)