Apple Newsroom, Tuesday:

Apple today announced Apple Home Collection, a new lineup of smart home accessories — including indoor and outdoor cameras, thermostats, temperature sensors, and a video doorbell and door lock — designed in collaboration with LG Electronics and Schneider Electric. These new accessories are simple to set up starting with one tap with iPhone, and everything is managed through the Apple Home app — no separate app or account required. Each accessory is encrypted end-to-end in Apple Home, so only users and the people they choose can access their home data.

Apple Home Collection looks pretty much like what you’d expect Apple-designed smart home products to look like, just… not from Apple. The products “feature a clean, minimal aesthetic and premium materials, with every detail considered, from how they mount and adjust to how they look and feel alongside Apple products throughout the home,” which sounds exactly like what Apple would write if it had slapped its own logo on the products instead of “collaborating” with LG and Schneider.

I’ve been building a smart home ecosystem for several years, so I’m not tempted by most of the Collection. We’re currently all-in on Eufy cameras, our Ecobee thermostat works great, and we love our Aqara U400 front door lock (unlocking as we approach is game-changing). The compact and unobtrusive design of the LG door lock is quite appealing, and I do like the “privacy tilt” feature of the LG Indoor Cam, though. (More indoor cameras should have privacy features.) I’m mostly tempted by the LG doorbell. I’ve been wanting to replace our ancient analog doorbell with an electronic version with a camera, and this looks to be a solid entry. (I’d been eying the UniFi doorbell and smart chime, but that isn’t HomeKit compatible without a lot of effort.)

If you haven’t already committed to a smart home ecosystem and want an easy onramp, Apple Home Collection looks like a solid starting point. (Everyone should at least have a smart lock on their front door.)

You can preorder items in the Collection today and buy them starting in December—but only (initially?) in the U.S. and Canada, with some products also available in the UK. No word on when—or if—these will be available in the rest of the world.

I rarely link to Marques Brownlee’s videos because 21.4 million subscribers, but his general HomeView skepticism closely mirrors my own, though he lands firmly in the “skip” camp and I’m more yolo about it. I know a few people who would like nothing more than an adorable iPad-on-a-swivel in their living room, always available to play music or the latest podcast, check their schedules or the weather, and ask “How many Jedi survived after Order 66?” as they watch Maul – Shadow Lord. An iPad mini on a $10 or $20 swivel would be more useful, but also costlier, and decidedly less cute.

Apple Newsroom:

Apple today introduced Apple HomeView, designed to be central to the home and personal to everyone in it. With a stunning 7-inch Liquid Retina display, HomeView brings entertainment, connection, and smart home management together in one place, from playing music and making FaceTime calls to home monitoring and hands-free automations with voice control — all designed with privacy and security at the core. HomeView recognizes users by their faces, adapting so they can access their personal content in Messages, FaceTime, Calendar, Reminders, and Find My. HomeView features Siri AI, an entirely new version of Siri that’s profoundly more capable and conversational, with broad world knowledge that powers richer music discovery and onscreen awareness. When paired with an Apple Intelligence-enabled device, it can also draw on a user’s personal context, such as their Calendar, Messages, and relevant information across their apps, to provide more helpful, personalized responses.

I kid, of course. HomeView is not just an iPad mini on a swivel.

It’s also wall-mountable.

You’ll forgive my joshing here. My initial reaction upon watching the oddly chaotic three-minute intro video was but why? Why wasn’t this an iPad, mini or otherwise? Those are more portable and therefore more useful in more places.

(Okay… okay, yeah, I hear it. “Less portable, more purchases.”)

My initial reaction was immediately replaced with I must have this! It’s cute and fun and, at $300, right on the edge of why not?

I have no need for one. I don’t often use an iPad in my kitchen. I’m not generally checking my calendar or taking FaceTime calls from there, and the HomePod minis currently deployed in every room handle my ambient Siri needs. (Though not Siri AI, which HomeView supports, and indeed, seems designed around.)

And yet.

The design is reminiscent of the Apple iMac G4, known variously as the “sunflower” or “lamp” computer, and endearingly anthropomorphized in one of Apple’s most adorable ads. I have two of them. They’re beautiful objects.

(I hope Apple eventually pays homage to that ad. Alas, there’s no “tongue” for HomeView to stick out.)

The lack of a battery means HomeView is limited in where it can go. Having a power cable running across your kitchen counter is also not terribly appealing. A charging base would have been an interesting option: HomeView could mostly sit in one place, but could be moved to a more convenient location as needed.

(It’s powered by a removable USB-C cable, so it can be unplugged and moved. If it boots instantaneously, that could be a reasonable alternative, but it means, for example, ending a FaceTime call if you want to continue it in the living room.)

The most compelling feature was multiuser support. Up to six faces can be recognized by the Center Stage camera to unlock personal content. Because HomeView doesn’t have Face ID, it instead uses device proximity, as John Gruber learned:

But in order for users to be recognized — by voice or face — they must have a “registered personal device” that supports Apple Intelligence and Siri AI, that device must be present on the home’s Wi-Fi network, and it must have been recently unlocked. […]

Effectively, your iPhone or iPad serves as a second factor to securely identify you.

I can only hope that Apple is now motivated to bring multiuser functionality to iPad and iPhone.

HomeView is $299 for the swivel model in one of four colors (Silver, Starlight, Rose Pink, and Space Gray) and $299 plus the cost of a mounting base for the wall-mountable model (which comes in only Silver and Space Gray). Mounting options include USB-C ($60), AC wired ($80), and Power over Ethernet ($130). PoE is not yet available for purchase.

(Yes, I also find it odd that the wall-mounted version, which lacks the base, swivel, and down-firing woofer, is the more expensive option.)

Preorders are open now, and HomeView is available November 13.

Unless you’re in the European Union, that is:

Apple HomeView is not available for sale in the European Union, as Siri AI is currently unavailable in iOS in the EU. Apple is working constructively with the EU in an attempt to find a path forward.

That must sting.

Elevation Lab, writing on their company blog:

We launched an AirTag silencing tool recently. We have always made products we want for ourselves, and this was no different - we wanted it for AirTags on our bikes. (Some of us here have bikes more valuable than our cars.)

Unfortunately, “products we want for ourselves” and “bikes more valuable than our cars” are perhaps more telling of the Elevation Lab culture than I think they meant it to be.

Why would someone want a silent tracking device hidden on expensive gear? They understand why AirTags make noise: to identify them audibly when an item is out of sight, and to alert someone when an unknown AirTag is near them.

If you lose track of an item attached to an AirTag, Apple’s Find My network gets you in the vicinity. The chirps guide you to the item.

If a thief steals your bike, the “unknown AirTag” alert chirps and informs them the bike is being tracked.

Unstated but implied by the Elevation Lab team is they don’t want to alert a thief to the presence of an AirTag, lest it’s found and discarded, rendering their expensive bikes and other gear untraceable.

That may be the case, but were I a thief, the chirp of an AirTag emanating from some recently pilfered kit would cause me to abandon it immediately rather than waste time finding and disabling that AirTag. In addition to making items easy to find when stolen, AirTags can also act as a deterrent to them being stolen in the first place.

That suggests these folks were more interested in silently tracking their stolen bikes rather than preventing their bikes from being stolen in the first place. Why? Were they hoping to engage in a bit of vigilante justice?

Even if they weren’t and planned to call the police to direct them to the stolen goods, nothing is more convincing that the gear is yours than triggering an alarm from your iPhone.

In retrospect though, this also has the side effect of aiding someone with bad intentions to track someone that wouldn’t get phone notifications.

The backlash must have been tremendous. That, or a lawyer made a phone call to point out the obvious liability of having “someone with bad intentions” use their product to stalk, harass, or harm someone.

We have removed the product

Good.

and will use our patent on it to prevent anyone else from making one in the future.

What an odd detail to include. A patent means the silencing method is described in explicit detail—practically an instruction manual for how to create the product. A cynical and uncharitable person might suggest they mean for others to follow those instructions themselves.

Sincerely, Elevation Lab

I hope Elevation Lab takes a lesson here: always seek feedback from outside your own bubble.

When people talk about throwing the cocktail party of their dreams, this is what I imagine they mean.

On a summer evening in 1972, a pivotal generation of Harlem Renaissance artists and intellectuals gathered at Duke Ellington’s townhouse. For over three hours, this extraordinary group - many of whom had not seen each other in fifty years - reminisced, critiqued, argued, laughed, and drank while wrestling with their place in a rapidly shifting cultural landscape.

Filmed “by legendary filmmaker William Greaves and completed fifty years later by his son David,” this may represent the greatest collection of Black excellence ever captured on film. Eubie Blake’s comment, “Being here with all these intelligentsias, I’m afraid to open my mouth,” reflects exactly how I’d feel.

Read more about the film and William Greaves (an artist I was, sadly, unfamiliar with until now).

This is a film we’d excitedly build an event around when I was co-chair for Black@Apple—historic, illuminating, joyous. I hope someone at Apple is already making the necessary phone calls. (And please invite me if it happens!)

Reviews: New York Amsterdam News, Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, The Guardian, Rotten Tomatoes (100%), Metacritic (93/100).

Sheets.works publishes wonderful interactive visual essays (“Data Drops”) every week, and I always forget to visit (and link to) them. This week, my socials and feeds were awash with links to one of its recent essays, The people holding up the internet:

We downloaded the full history of 23 pieces of software that phones, browsers and servers depend on, and counted everyone who made ten or more changes to each one between October 2025 and October 2026. Then we listed what is actually installed on an Android phone, an iPhone and a Windows PC.

11 of 23 projects had one or two people doing the regular work.

If you’ve been on the internet for any reasonable amount of time, you’ve probably seen the “All modern digital infrastructure” XKCD comic. This essay is the proof.

One example of the “random person” who is “thanklessly maintaining” critical internet infrastructure is Todd Miller. Miller made “5,408 of 5,409 changes to sudo between 2008 and 2018.” sudo is “the command that gives you admin rights on a Mac or a Linux server” (and the subject of another well-known XKCD comic). It has about 30 current sponsors on GitHub and an “estimated annual budget” of just under $62,000 on Open Collective. That is a mere pittance for a project that is used by virtually every sysadmin and Unixy system in the world to gate access to sensitive files and destructive commands, yet is “the best funded one-person project in our count,” notes Sheets.works.

I find it both exceedingly heartwarming and immensely unsettling that huge swaths of our digital infrastructure are maintained by a random collection of volunteers who make effectively zero money from their work and whose main incentive is to write code they’re proud to share with the world.

The lack of financial support for these critical projects stands in stark contrast to the billions of dollars they (directly or indirectly) help generate. Meanwhile, the new Omarchy Linux “distribution”—effectively the personal Linux configuration of white nationalist David Heinemeier Hansson (“DHH”)—accumulated nearly $27 million in pledges in the span of a few months.

Merit, longevity, and foundational importance to the internet are clearly not the overarching criteria for securing funding for open source projects.

Sareen Habeshian, BBC:

The public will be able to watch the execution of a former US Army major by firing squad, US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth has said.

A Defence Department official told the BBC the execution of Nidal Hasan, who fatally shot 13 unarmed US soldiers at the Fort Hood military base in 2009, would be livestreamed.

It is believed it would be the first public execution in the US in almost a century.

Truly barbaric. Trump approves of livestreaming the execution. J.D. Vance says he wouldn’t watch. When J.D. Vance is your voice of sanity, it’s time to reexamine your life.

I’m shocked Hegseth and Trump aren’t monetizing the execution on pay-per-view. Yet, I suppose.

Donald Trump, spouting off on “Truth” Social on Thursday (archived on Trump’s Truth to avoid searing your eyeballs):

The White House considers anyone that uses the term, ‘Artificial Intelligence,’ as opposed to the highly accepted new and more accurate term, ‘Super Intelligence,’ THE ENEMY! President DONALD J. TRUMP

That’s the sitting president of the United States, focusing his precious and unwavering attention on the biggest issue of the day, in a way only a very stable genius can.

A few days earlier, Trump toady Elon Musk had already declared in a tweet that he plans to rename his company from SpaceXAI to SpaceXSI—which, coincidentally, I’m sure, can be abbreviated to SXSI. I expect he’ll change the stock ticker any day now.

In the days following Trump’s initial demand to rename “AI” to “SI,” Slovenia has seen a run on its top-level domain. Anguilla must be fuming.

And it gets more ridiculous. Adi Robertson in The Verge:

Justice Department press releases have been modified to include the phrase, trumpeting that a man who flooded streaming platforms with AI-generated songs between 2017 and 2024 committed “Super Intelligence-Assisted Music Streaming Fraud.”

I like to imagine that the prosecutor tasked with making this linguistic fable happen executes massive air quotes each time.

Greg “Joz” Joswiak announces the event on X/Twitter with a video of a hand-embroidered invitation. Hello Apple on Instagram has an extended version. It’s quite lovely.

(Apple has really leaned into the handcrafted aesthetic recently, starting, I feel, after the backlash to its “Crush” ad. See, for example, A Critter Carol, the Apple TV logo, or the Mac Neo ad. More, please.)

The event is expected to “focus on new smart home products, including the long-rumored smart home hub, a new Apple TV 4K, and a refreshed HomePod mini,” according to MacRumors.

In my post about Margaret Hamilton, I wrote:

Hamilton insisted on calling the still-nascent field “software engineering” to describe the exacting development process she and her team were pioneering to ensure the safety of those astronauts.

That’s accurate as far as it goes, but woefully incomplete. Hamilton offered a far more extensive explanation in an interview published in an out-of-print textbook; Wikipedia quotes a portion of that interview, but Dave DeGraw tracked down the full interview. In it, Hamilton provides much-needed context behind her desire to call her field “software engineering.” Here’s the section that leads into the Wikipedia quote:

Requirements engineers and software engineers necessarily became interchangeable, as did their life-cycle phases— suggesting that a system is a system, no matter from which discipline things had originated. From this perspective, system design issues became one and the same as software engineering design issues. Yet, the systems-software part of the flight software was in a world all of its own!

“What is the difference,” I asked, “between what they are doing and what we are doing?” Knowing this, and the lack of understanding by many of what it took to create real world software-based systems and the part our software played within these systems, I wanted to give our software “legitimacy” so that it (and those building it) would be given its due respect; and, as a result I began to call what we were doing “software engineering” to distinguish it from other kinds of engineering; yet, treat each type of engineering as part of the overall systems engineering process.

The whole interview is fascinating.

(Via MJ Tsai.)

Janine Liberty, MIT News:

Margaret Hamilton, a profoundly influential computer scientist best known for leading the software engineering team at MIT’s Instrumentation Lab during NASA’s Apollo program, died on Sep. 30. She was 90.

A computing pioneer who authored over 130 publications, Hamilton helped to establish software engineering as a dedicated discipline. She worked at MIT from 1959 until the mid-1970s, after which she became a successful computing entrepreneur and CEO.

Trip Gabriel’s obituary in The New York Times credits Hamilton as the person “who led the 100-person team that wrote the onboard software for the Apollo missions, guiding Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to a safe landing on the moon.”

Hamilton insisted on calling the still-nascent field “software engineering” to describe the exacting development process she and her team were pioneering to ensure the safety of those astronauts.

Later in life, Hamilton became an icon for women in science and technology, especially after a now-famous photo, showing her next to a printout of her MIT team’s Apollo code, began circulating online.

The New York Times tops its obituary with the 1969 photo of “the 5-foot-4 Ms. Hamilton standing beside a head-high stack of printed code developed for the moon landing.”

Just a few days ago, someone posted that photo on Mastodon. I saw only the bottom few pixels as I scrolled, but immediately recognized it. It’s that iconic.

My friend and former colleague Alex Cox, reflecting on his decision to send his son to public schools, in another follow-up to Nikole Hannah-Jones’ school segregation essay:

I grew up in a small town where the private schools were all religious and highly segregated. The public schools were integrated and the main ones most kids attended. My grandfather went to a segregated public school until his “graduation” at 8th grade, and my mother attended the same segregated school until her 3rd grade year when schools were integrated.

My grandfather used to sit on our porch every day and talk to people as they came by. He had worked hard his entire life, saved money, and had made good investments. One day, members of a local black church visited and asked for a donation for a private school they were starting, which would be attended by many of the black children currently in the public schools there.

His answer to them: “Why would I give money to start a school for our kids when we fought so long for them to be in public schools?”

A terrific response from Alex’s grandfather. Alex is now “heavily engaged” with his son’s public school education. The answer to low-performing public schools isn’t better, segregated private schools. It’s better public schools for everyone.

My friend Josh, responding to Nikole Hannah-Jones’ school segregation essay, points me to this case study of a plan to reduce such segregation in District 15 in Brooklyn, NY. The plan, created and facilitated by WXY Studio, was the result of a collaboration among New York City’s Department of Education, parents, educators, community advocates, and local politicians.

The 2024 D15 Evaluation and Reflection Report found that following implementation of the diversity plan, D15 middle schools climbed from the “second most socioeconomically segregated” district in New York City to 19th out of 32; more middle school students applied to more district schools; and “student stress and anxiety” during the admissions process declined significantly. Josh, who lived in District 15 with his wife Cori and their kids and participated in several of the workshops, describes the case study as “an insight into what can actually happen if folks really wanted to make it so.”

See Also: Troy Closson reporting the results in 2024 for The New York Times; and a Times Opinion piece by Brent Staples, who writes that this study—

[…] has shown it is possible to integrate schools — without rancor or a mass exodus of white families — when parents and school officials value integration as a benefit in itself.

Michael Simon, Macworld:

New Balance hasn’t changed the look of the 992 since that time, and it’s still offered in the same “Grey with white” colorway. If you head over there to buy one, you’ll see a photo at the end of the gallery of a person sitting cross-legged wearing a pair. They happen to be wearing blue jeans with black socks and sitting in a black leather chair. […]

On this day, the image is an especially poignant and a touching tribute to a man who made the shoe famous.

Assuming the image on the 922 page is new for today, it is indeed a very touching tribute.

Update: Via Nick Heer, this isn’t new for today; it’s there in an October 14, 2025 Wayback Machine capture (here’s the image captured April 6, 2026). Still a lovely tribute (and clever bit of stealth marketing), but it’s not specific to today.

Today marks fifteen years since Steve Jobs died. Apple’s Remembering Steve tribute from 2011 remains online and is as touching today as it was then.

It’s also the first anniversary since Steve’s passing where Apple has a new CEO. John Ternus and Executive Chairman Tim Cook each shared their thoughts about Steve on X/Twitter.

I’ve previously shared Steve’s influence on me. I continue to miss his passion and clarity.

If you’re a fan of Star Trek: The Next Generation, a completionist, or enjoy absurdity—or all three—I’m guessing you will too.

I found Donald Trump’s interview in Time to be both utterly maddening and deeply disturbing. Trump is seemingly incapable of completing a thought. He self-interrupts, backtracks, repeats himself, and goes off on digressions. Kudos to Time for allowing that to come through in the transcript. (And for fact-checking his statements, even though it would have been even better if it had been both more extensive and presented inline.)

There are several jaw-dropping moments in the interview, but I wanted to highlight two. The first for the political ramifications; the second as a stark example of Trump’s Swiss-cheese mind.

First is Trump’s refusal to state that he won’t invoke the Insurrection Act (or deploy ICE) ahead of or during the midterm elections. Steve Benen at MS Now covers Trump’s hedge pretty well. As Benen writes, “when asked whether he would rule out declaring a state of emergency in the run-up to the midterms, the correct answer should have been, ‘Of course I’d rule that out.’” Trump can’t do that because, as is obvious to anyone paying even partial attention, he wants desperately to affect the midterms, and invoking this Act, either as a means of intimidation at the polls or to disrupt the election, is being seriously considered by him and his administration. He can’t stop talking about it. He understands his regime screeches to a halt the moment Republicans no longer control Congress and that he’d quickly face serious calls for both impeachment and prosecution.

The second section worth highlighting starts early in the interview, when Trump is asked about the U.S. debt, which reached $40 trillion and for which he, naturally, blamed Joe Biden (please excuse—and prepare yourself for—the extensive exposure to Trump’s words):

You haven’t lowered the debt because of President Biden?

No, because they keep paying higher interest rates. We had great job numbers two weeks ago, right? What do they do? Raise the interest rate. Because today…I say it all the time because I want to try and get these people to do what’s right for the country. When we did well years ago, they lowered the interest rate. Now, when you do well—in fact, I had great job numbers, 162,000. It was four times bigger than projected. And I said, “Oh, that’s not good news because they’re going to raise the interest rate.” It used to be they’d lower the interest rate, so we have great—because we’re better credit.

So you say if they’re going to do that all the time, how do you ever pay off the debt? Now you can do it through other means. I know I’m the best in the world. The best—I don’t want to tell you what those means are, but you can pay off the debt through other means. But the one thing that you can do is pay it off through growth, and we’ve never had growth like this.

Then later:

What’s driving this growth is AI, so we’d love to ask you a few questions about that.

No, what’s driving the growth is automobile plants are opening, many plants, Pfizer, all of the drug companies are spending hundreds of billions of dollars. How about Apple? Apple’s spending $600 million. The great chip company from Taiwan is spending $500 billion. Jensen Huang is spending. No, it’s not—look, we’re building more automobile plants in the United States, and bigger ones, than we’ve ever built before. […]

It’s not just AI.

Then, after a question about a recent OpenAI attempt to access government websites, he opines on the artificial intelligence—sorry, super intelligence—industry:

I don’t have to destroy the industry. We’re making a lot of money with that industry. That industry is the industrial revolution, but bigger. It’s the internet, but much bigger. I don’t have to destroy that industry. By the way, you know, I had a very good meeting with President Xi. We get along, right? We talked about it not much, but a little bit. But I told him, I said, we don’t want—you know, we’re leading them pretty good. He knows that. And I said, “We don’t want to take this thing that we’ve done so well with and turn it off. I don’t want to turn it off. It’s tremendous amounts of money.”

Now, when you talk about the debt, the growth is going to pay off the debt. Growth will pay it off. Now, it’s pretty bad when they keep raising interest rates, and they only raise them because they have Trump derangement syndrome. And I don’t blame Kevin. In fact, when he took the job, he’s got mostly people from Barack Hussein Obama and Sleepy Joe Biden on the board. And I don’t know what he’s—I actually said, “What are you going to do?” But they would rather see the country do badly because I’m President. But we’re blowing through interest rates because it’s got—we got this thing going. If the interest rates were—even, if they were low, we should be paying the lowest interest rate of any country in the world, because all these countries that are making money, almost all, are only making money because of this.

Switzerland. They sell billions of dollars of watches. We didn’t take their watch, and they’re considered [unintelligible]. They have the lowest interest rate, one half of 1%, and we’re paying much more than that. And yet, if I said to Switzerland, “Sorry, I don’t want to lose $40 billion a year in order to have your watches.” We just picked up $40 billion. I could do the same thing with 50 countries, more than that, much more than that, and we would make more money than any country has ever dreamed of. We should be the lowest interest rate with the most prime country—we should be the lowest interest rate in the world. In the old days, that would happen. When you did well, the interest rate used to—you could check. You did well, you announced good numbers. Now you announce good numbers, we’re going to rock and roll and raise interest rates to try and kill it.

I don’t even know where to begin. It’s a turbulent ride through Trump’s unencumbered mind as his wildly misfiring neurons grab hold of any snatch of seemingly relevant data and regurgitate it.

You can pay off the debt through growth which is because of automobile plants and drug companies and Apple and has nothing to do with AI but we’re making tremendous amounts of money with AI driving interest rates too high because countries are making money off us and we’re losing $40 billion a year buying Swiss watches and we could make so much money if we stopped buying stuff from other countries and lowered our interest rates. Sleepy Hussein.

His screed about Switzerland is especially illuminating because it exposes Trump’s complete lack of understanding of how trade works. You don’t “lose money” when you buy something you want or need. That’s called “spending money.” It doesn’t imply a trade deficit, it has nothing to do with interest rates, and it isn’t addressed with tariffs that raise the price of the very thing you’re buying. And you definitely aren’t “making money” when you stop buying stuff. At best you’re saving money—but then you don’t have the thing you otherwise wanted to buy.

Kudos again to Time for letting Trump ramble and then just transcribing him in a way that is reflective of how he actually speaks. They seemingly only added punctuation to make it passably readable.

No word on whether he spoke that punctuation out loud.

The opening of the Public Citizen report I noted in the aforelinked Trump Crypto Game (“‘Thin Air,’ Real Money: Donald Trump’s Crypto Products Have Left Investors at Least $4.7 Billion Underwater”):

“I am not a fan of Bitcoin and other Cryptocurrencies, which are not money, and whose value is highly volatile and based on thin air,” President Donald Trump tweeted in July 2019. “Unregulated Crypto Assets can facilitate unlawful behavior, including drug trade and other illegal activity.”

Seven years later, Trump has become the world’s foremost crypto salesperson, hawking nonfungible tokens, meme coins, governance tokens, stablecoins, and shares in a digital-asset treasury.

What changed? The president realized there were billions to be made hawking thin air to supporters, supplicants, and speculators.

Trump recognizes a scam when he sees one. It just took him a while to figure out how to profit from it.

In “Thin Air, Real Money,” you attempt to make money from Donald Trump’s cryptoscams, playing either as Trump (“Difficulty: None”) or one of his sucker investors (“Difficulty: Impossible”) in an ’80s-style video game. It was created by Public Citizen and is based on its recently published “‘Thin Air,’ Real Money: Donald Trump’s Crypto Products Have Left Investors at Least $4.7 Billion Underwater” report, which details the depth of Trump’s crypto corruption.

Glenn Fleishman, Six Colors:

ElevationLab has released an AirTag product I find appalling, and I strongly urge they immediately withdraw it from sale and recall all inventory. The AirTag Silencer is a simple device: remove the back panel and battery from an AirTag, position the Silencer’s highly engineered pin over the speaker, tap the pin with a hammer, and the AirTag’s speaker is destroyed. This prevents it from emitting an alert in three circumstances, only one of which is triggered by an owner. The other two scenarios aid stalkers and perpetrators of domestic violence, among others. I will not link to it.

Disabling an AirTag speaker is a way for an unwanted party to more easily track someone without their knowledge and consent. Apple designed the AirTag to alert people when an unknown tracker was moving with them (via software), or when a tracker moved or was bumped (via a sound) after remaining in a location for a period of time. The latter case is critical, as Find My items have been found in purses, luggage, vehicles, and other things that move, left there either provably or putatively by a party attempting to track someone otherwise unaware they’re under remote observation.

Selling a product that deliberately breaks a safety feature designed to alert you to unwanted tracking is incredibly, unbelievably myopic. (Not just sell it, they give one away when you buy a 4-pack of their AirTag cases.) They spent untold hours iterating on this product, refining it over “many prototypes and hundreds of destroyed AirTags,” and not once did someone stop and ask, “Can this be used by bad people to do bad things?”

It’s the type of product a company creates when there’s no one in the room advocating for victims of stalking and abuse—or those people are silenced by management who decide to put products over people.

By releasing this product, ElevationLab is legitimizing a back-alley practice, a tacit endorsement that it’s okay to surreptitiously silence AirTags. If ElevationLab is selling a hassle-free solution, it must be acceptable. It’s not.

To say I’m disappointed in ElevationLab is woefully inadequate. I’m appalled.

I have long respected the company’s product design, and own and have recommended several of their products (including the 10-Year Battery AirTag case). I won’t be doing that unless and until they pull this product and apologize for releasing it.

Karl Bode:

In case you missed it, and I envy you if you did, Facebook/Meta recently unveiled “Muse,” its new AI agent that’s supposed to help you do things like craft emails, make dinner reservations, sell products on Facebook Marketplace, and offload mundane tasks to a massive and violently-unethical online ad monopoly. […]

Meta claimed repeatedly that their new Muse agent was built with a heavy focus on privacy and security. But this is Meta, a soggy ad monopoly run by an unfireable authoritarian-friendly manbaby with a long history of making positively terrible choices, so things very quickly got out of control.

Right out of the gate, Muse launched with a nasty zero-day flaw that created a backdoor on Mac computers, allowing a hacker to not only gain total control of the Muse AI client, but surveil you without your knowledge.

Muse also disclosed a YouTuber’s home address (without permission), accessed text messages and sent them to Meta (without permission), and compromised its own file system (just because someone asked it to).

Meta is the last Big Tech company I’d allow to access my computer. I’d just as soon grant access to a stranger on the street. I am unsurprised by these privacy violations, because Meta is the scorpion in the fable. It cannot help but abuse your privacy. It is its nature.

If you were wondering why the name Nikole Hannah-Jones was familiar, she’s the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist behind The 1619 Project:

The 1619 Project argues that the 250 years of chattel slavery that followed were not an aberration or a footnote; they were the foundation upon which the nation's wealth, culture, and political systems were built.

It is an origin story that forces a reckoning with the brutal hypocrisy at the heart of America's founding ideals and reveals who we have been, who we are, and who we might yet become.

The original collection of essays, published seven years ago in The New York Times Magazine, remains a journalistic tour de force and has spawned books, curricula, a podcast, and a television documentary.

I know I already linked to “An Argument,” episode #898 of This American Life, in yesterday’s post about Nikole Hannah-Jones’ decision to send her daughter Najya to segregated, high-poverty schools, but the episode is so good, it deserves a post of its own.

I was most struck by Najya’s quiet composure and understated exasperation. Despite her mom’s “experiment,” she was doing well. I couldn’t help wondering how much better she would be doing if she’d been sent to a higher-scoring school. It is, frustratingly, an unresolvable counterfactual.

I laughed out loud when Najya, still in middle school, informed her mom that she wanted to attend Harvard University, a predominantly white institution—not Howard University, the HBCU where her mom teaches:

Hannah-Jones: Yeah, I mean, look, I’ve been ingraining Howard into her since she was, like, three years old. And then one day, she comes back from middle school and she says she wants to go to Harvard. And I was like, we have never mentioned the word Harvard in our household. What the hell is happening? I’m like, what? […] Like, Harvard? What child? ’Cause I’m like, did I mishear you? Did you accidentally say Howard? No.

Joffe-Walt: I love that your child’s rebellion is to tell her mother that she wants to go to Harvard University.

Hannah-Jones: Exactly, and I’m disappointed. I’m like, what is wrong with you?

Chana Joffe-Walt, who produced the episode, sums up Hannah-Jones’ dilemma:

Public schools are unequal and segregated as they were ten years ago, 30 years ago, 60 years ago. If you sacrifice to make a change, but change doesn’t come, all you’re left with is the sacrifice.

Listen on the web, in Overcast, or Apple Podcasts.

Clare Duffy, CNN:

Apple says its decision to remove ICEBlock and similar platforms from the app store last year was prompted by concerns — including those raised by the Trump administration — about agent safety following a fatal shooting that left two detainees dead at a Dallas Immigration and Customs Enforcement office.

Apple’s explanation came in a July letter to Rep. Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat and ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, who earlier this year launched an investigation into the Justice Department’s role in the removal of the apps from Apple’s and Google’s app stores and the impact on constitutionally protected speech. The letter has not previously been reported. […]

Ultimately, Apple determined ICE tracking apps violated its guidelines because they provided “precise location information about ICE officers (and, as a result, other individuals who may be in proximity to ICE agents, such as protestors or detainees), thus providing a potential roadmap for targeted violence and creating a significant risk of harm,” the company said in its letter.

For some reason, the CNN article does not point to either Congressman Raskin’s press release or to the letter he sent to Apple (PDF), both of which are worth reading. Additionally, Apple’s letter hasn’t been published by either Congressman Raskin or CNN (and certainly not by Apple), so it’s impossible to verify Apple’s response. If CNN and Duffy have a copy of the letter (and Duffy’s reporting suggests they do), I don’t understand why they haven’t released it.

Given what is being reported, and what’s in the Congressman’s reply, Apple’s response doesn’t hold much water. As Congressman Raskin notes, this administration has a demonstrated “pattern of lying about facts and evidence.” Relying on the administration’s word is either naïve or bullshit, and Apple is anything but naïve. ICEBlock was as much of a threat to ICE officers as Apple Maps and Google Maps. Both, naturally, remain available.

Apple’s reason for pulling the app at the time was “objectionable content.” It seems obvious that Apple used that as a convenient excuse to remove an app because of direct pressure from the government out of a fear of retaliation.

Either that, or Apple was happy to remove an app that protected its customers from violent attacks and believes it’s perfectly acceptable to curtail a developer’s First Amendment rights.

Congressman Raskin asks Apple to—

… conduct your own independent review of the decision to remove those apps to ascertain if they do, in fact, violate your terms of service—and please notify me when that review begins and concludes.

I think it’s time to call Tim Cook (and John Ternus) into Congress.

I’m finally getting around to reading this terrific but gut-wrenching essay by Nikole Hannah-Jones, published last week in The New York Times Magazine. (Gift link.)

Hannah-Jones sent her daughter, Najya, to “a segregated, high-poverty school” in an effort to upend the status quo that often resulted in Black students attending underfunded schools. Najya eventually challenged her mom on that decision.

Glancing between her and the road, I told her everything that I had said a hundred times on stages, in interviews, in discussions since I had made her a symbol of how the choices we make can help sustain — or dismantle — educational inequality. I talked about the deep inequality in New York’s schools and how, like those Black families who came before us, we had an obligation to be part of the struggle of our larger community. Even if her schools were not academically the strongest, I explained, her father and I knew that we could provide for her tutoring and any other assistance to make up for what her school may have lacked.

But my child just shook her head, her face a mask of disbelief, and something else: betrayal.

“So you had money to send me to one of the best schools, and you chose not to?” she said, hurling her words. “Because other kids are disadvantaged, you didn’t want to put me in a great school?”

As a product of the New York public school system who did well in middle school and well enough in high school, I commiserate with both the author and her daughter. My mom made a different decision for me, first enrolling me in a private middle school the year I moved to America, then transferring me to a public intermediate school. Then, rather than having me attend the nearby (but academically weak) high schools, my mom insisted I apply to more academically challenging—and racially and economically integrated—schools. I eventually attended a well-regarded public high school that required interviews and high academic potential (and an interest in the medical sciences) to get in.

My private and intermediate schools were mostly Black, in mostly lower-middle-class Black neighborhoods that were walking distance from home, while my high school was a fully integrated “magnet” school an hour (and two buses) away in a mostly upper-middle-class white neighborhood.

If I had a kid, I’m not sure which decision I’d make. On the one hand, I’d want my child to have the best opportunities available to them, academically, socially, and culturally. On the other, I would not want them growing up in a bubble of privilege, wealth, racial isolation, and perceived superiority.

As I sit here today, I’m not sure which path I’d choose. Each of my school experiences was extremely valuable, but I’m confident that had I continued the expected path and attended my neighborhood high school, my life would have gone very differently: my magnet high school was one of the first in Brooklyn to have a computer science program.

I would want the same for my child. Yet I recognize that an “I got mine, and so will my kid” attitude leaves behind a population of children who could otherwise benefit from my having gotten mine. Hannah-Jones, again:

We desire to be let off the hook by these realities — that we tried and we failed; by the shamble of decades of halfhearted efforts; by how insoluble it is to achieve equality in a nation with our history. Instead of fortifying our determination to fight for integration, we have instead chosen to succumb to a collective apathy in the face of a system so devastatingly unequal that it puts at odds trying to be a good person with trying to be a good parent.

But for all of our justifications, including mine, an undeniable verity remains. As long as we continue to rescue our own children from the failing schools where we allow other people’s children to languish simply because those children have been born Black and poor in a nation of racism and riches, there is no absolution here. Not for me. Not for you. Not for any of us.

Set aside some time to read this (and some more for the This American Life episode #898, “An Argument”—Overcast, Apple Podcasts).

Alexander Bruzual, Trinidad Express:

Calypso legend Slinger Francisco, better known as the Mighty Sparrow, died on Sunday in New York at the age of 91.

A statement issued by Karen Francisco on Sunday afternoon said the calypsonian died peacefully, surrounded by family, after a brief illness.

“It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of Trinidad and Tobago’s Calypso icon, Slinger Francisco, known to the world as ‘The Mighty Sparrow’,” the statement said.

Margalit Fox, The New York Times:

A singer, songwriter and guitarist, Sparrow — his given name was Slinger Francisco — was renowned for his sonorous voice, unremitting energy and extraordinary command of the verbal prestidigitation and sly double-entendre that are among the hallmarks of calypso lyrics.

Sparrow, who began his career in the mid-1950s, was sometimes described as the last of the true calypso singers. But in fact he was a Janus-headed figure, simultaneously preserving calypso tradition and inventing it anew. As the 20th century gave way to the 21st, he continued to dazzle audiences with witty, topical lyrics and arrangements that defied listeners not to dance.

In 2005, The Daily News of New York called him “the Frank Sinatra of Trinidad.” But in the estimation of many, the Mighty Sparrow was so mighty that he exceeded even Sinatran proportions.

Peter Mason, The Guardian:

Loved and feted by Trinidadians more than any other public figure in the island’s history, he was to calypso what Bob Marley was to reggae — an inspirational living legend. In Britain, no less than elsewhere, the sheer wit and quality of classic songs such as Jean and Dinah, Congo Man and Mae Mae brought calypso to many who would never otherwise have encountered the music form, particularly in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, when he was in his prime.

NBC News/The Associated Press:

The Mighty Sparrow will be remembered as “a defining voice of our culture, a master storyteller and a towering figure whose music helped carry calypso from Trinidad and Tobago to the world,” the Trinbago Unified Calypsonians’ Organisation said in a statement.

The Mighty Sparrow was a mainstay of my youth in Trinidad and after moving to Brooklyn. Jean and Dinah, Wanted Dead or Alive, Drunk & Disorderly, Gu Nu Gu, Tobago Girl, Doh Back Back, Whole Night We Jamming… if you were at a Trini lime, Ten to One is Sparrow pulsing through the speakers, uncles and aunties clinking Carib bottles and wining to the rhythm. Danceable, sure, but also lyrically dense with history lessons—and irreverent ribaldry. I doubt there’s a Trinbagonian over the age of twenty-five unfamiliar with Birdie.

Everybody down by de Express… Sparrow Dead.

Vidit Bhargava on Mastodon:

Made an iPhone Duo Walkman. Duo-Man!

Duo-Man offers the complete walkman experience on the iPhone Duo. Open the Duo to pick and ‘insert’ the cassette, Close the Duo to start listening.

And Yes, I actually recorded the button clicks and static noise from a real Walkman! 😀

This was for @BitRigApp ’s hackathon today. Fun 3 hr sprint.

The first killer app for iPhone Duo. (Be sure to watch the video.)

(I didn’t think “kids these days” had any idea what a “Walkman” was, but this isn’t Bhargava’s first Walkman concept.)

I’m predicting an abundance of clever (or at least whimsical) apps that hinge (sorry) on the Duo’s folding design, much as the original iPhone was a playground for experimentation. My 5% chance of buying a Duo is now up to about 8%.

James Savage spent ten years at Apple as a software engineer on Safari, App Clips, and other technologies. He left last year “to focus on smaller and more personal work.” Last week he released Drops, his first app since going indie:

Super excited (and only a little nervous) to say that Drops, my caffeine tracking app, is finally out! After 12 years, I once again have something on the App Store.

James describes his app as “a simple habit tracker for iPhone”:

Drops focuses on quickly logging drinks and places information front and center, getting you in and out without games or distractions. Log the soda you had at lunch, see where it leaves your caffeine for bedtime, and get on with your day.

Drops is thoughtful and carefully crafted, with an attractive yet wonderfully minimalist UI that gets out of your way. You can quickly record what you consume throughout the day with a single tap on one of the dozens of beverage presets (with caffeine levels for everything from Americanos to Sprite), or customize your drink by adjusting the caffeine level (decaf, half, full), number of espresso shots, even bean type. You can also easily add your own custom beverages. Drops is completely free (and ad-free), with an optional $7-a-year in-app purchase to unlock more themes and support its development. It also sports a beautiful icon designed by the good folks at The Iconfactory.

If you want to track “how caffeinated you are,” give Drops a shot.

Between this emotional farewell ceremony for Mike Krukow and his final KNBR Post-Game Wrap, I sobbed for nearly 90 minutes straight. I think I went through a quarter of a Kleenex box.

I’ve been listening to Mike Krukow and Duane Kuiper—Kruk and Kuip—call ballgames for 28 years, far longer than any other announcers. They are the voices of Giants baseball and a beloved San Francisco institution.

Only Kruk is retiring this season; Kuip plans to continue calling games (despite a recent throat cancer diagnosis). But Giants broadcasts won’t be the same without this iconic duo yucking it up in my ear. (I attended many a game at Candlestick Park with a transistor radio and earpiece so I could hear them call the game, a tradition that continued at what is now Oracle Park, just with an iPhone and the MLB app.)

I will miss Kruk—and Kruk and Kuip—dearly.

Atta babe.

(The entire 65-minute ceremony is worth watching, but if you don’t have an hour, Kuip’s tribute to his broadcast partner starts at 35:31, and Kruk’s farewell starts right after, at 47:06. But if you’re a Giants fan—or even just a baseball fan—you’ll want to watch it all. Just stock up on Kleenex.)

There are many reasons why baseball is a beautiful sport, but none more than for moments like this. If this doesn’t bring tears to your eyes, you’re not hooked up right.

Not a bad start either for Verlander’s final game: 5⅓ innings, 5 hits, 2 runs, 6 strikeouts, 1 walk in a 4–3 no-decision win over the Pittsburgh Pirates that ended with a 2-run walk-off homer.

Verlander pitched one unremarkable season for the San Francisco Giants in 2025, finishing 4–11 with a 3.85 ERA in 29 games. But with a career 266–159 record, 3.33 ERA, 3 Cy Young Awards, a Top 40 finish in career wins (266), and a Top 10 in strikeouts (3,560), Verlander is a sure-bet first-round Hall of Famer.

Melody Schreiber, reporting for The Guardian:

The Trump administration is removing 760,000 people enrolled in the Affordable Care Act (ACA) marketplace on allegations of fraud, officials said on Tuesday – adding to previous efforts to chip away at federally subsidized insurance programs and likely causing some of the lowest-income Americans to forego healthcare, experts said.

The US government is also investigating about 420,000 people whom they suspect of fraud, and they are putting a six-month enrollment moratorium on new agents and brokers selling Obamacare policies, officials said at a press conference.

The removed enrollees are a mixture of “phantoms” and “ghosts” as well as people who don’t meet the eligibility requirements of Obamacare, said Mehmet Oz, the administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).

“These are not real people,” he said, claiming that expelling them from the ACA marketplace would save the federal government $2.2bn.

I’ll grant the potential for fraud here (though the CMS press release and fact sheet provide scant details). I’ll even let the “not real people” comment slide as a rhetorical explanation for the purported fake enrollments.

But this:

About 35% of ACA enrollees have never used their health insurance, Oz said. “That’s just not possible,” he said, adding, “So we know there is fraud.”

Oz—the head of a federal health insurance agency—clearly has no idea how insurance works. Healthy people who pay for and don’t use health insurance help spread the risk and costs of insurance coverage across a larger pool. Many healthy people pay for health insurance as a hedge against emergencies because the astronomical medical costs could otherwise bankrupt them. In some states, you’re required to carry medical insurance, regardless of your health. Some people refuse medical service because they can’t afford the after-insurance cost of care. Insurance companies count on a subset of people who dutifully pay their premiums and use little or no healthcare. Asserting fraud from non-use is logically flawed at best and actively deceitful at worst. Not only is it possible to have insurance and not use it, it’s literally the business model.

From the top down, this entire administration is filled with incompetent, clueless clowns.

Chris Dalla Riva at Can’t Get Much Higher combs through music streaming data to determine a workable definition of a “one-hit wonder”:

After crunching these numbers, I think a resolution to The One-Hit Wonder Paradox begins to emerge. A one-hit wonder doesn’t need to actually have a hit in the traditional sense. It can help. But nobody needs to crack the top 40 to join the one-hit wonder hall of fame. You just need to meet a few criteria.

A fun read (and listen—it’s copiously linked to YouTube music videos).

Jared Greenspan, MLB:

Ichiro [Suzuki] was on the mound in an annual All-Star Game against the best high school girls baseball players in Japan. And he dominated. Ichiro pitched a complete game shutout on 127 pitches with a whopping 17 strikeouts to steer his team to victory.

Ichiro has participated in similar exhibitions since at least 2021, helping to spotlight girls’ and women’s baseball in Japan. That’s fantastic, and a laudable goal.

Less fantastic are the predictably misogynistic responses to his appearances; see, for example, the comments on X/Twitter to the original (paywalled) Seattle Times article. Apparently some SportsBros are epically excited about an aging former professional baseball player dominating high school girls in a sport he played at the highest level for longer than most of his opponents have been alive.

What I’m seeing surprisingly little of from these SportsBros in this age of virulent transphobia is pushback against a “biological man” playing in “women’s sports.” I’ve been told this is the reason why we must ban transgender people from participating in sports.

This lack of pushback might lead one to believe that banning transgender players is about something other than “protecting our vulnerable girls.”

Donald Trump, speaking to the UN General Assembly on Tuesday (C-SPAN):

The United States also totally rejects any attempt to construct a globalist scheme to control for the artificial intelligence being spoken of so much now, hereinafter officially called super intelligence, changing the name, and that the use of the word artificial makes intelligence fake. It makes it sound fake, and it is not fake. It’s actually amazing, but we have to be careful. In fact, it is exactly the opposite of what it purports. From this point forward, all of United States documents, and hopefully the world’s will be changed to use the much more accurate term super, as opposed to artificial. So it’s super intelligence. In other words, welcome to the new world of super intelligence dash SI. SI. Let’s see if that goes. It sounds much better. It is much better, and it’s much more accurate. Let’s see if I have any power. Maybe I do, and maybe I don’t. We’re gonna find out pretty soon.

The term “artificial intelligence” was coined in 1955, but tossing aside seventy years of history is nothing for someone who, in fits of pique, flouts hundreds of years of history by unilaterally renaming international bodies of water.

Trump may have been at his most self-aware there at the end, questioning whether he has any power to drive this inane rename beyond his own government’s documents.

Trump also claims that “The United States leads the world in super intelligence,” which is a completely true and accurate statement because no-one else in the world is calling it “super intelligence.” It’s easy to win a game no one else is competing in.

Which naturally makes me wonder: which of our brown-nosing AI wannabe-overlords will be the first to start referring to their product as “super intelligence”? My gut instinct is to pick the obsequious Mark Zuckerberg, but the sycophantic Elon Musk, smarmy Sam Altman, and zealously earnest Dario Amodei might each eagerly adopt it to further ingratiate themselves with the regime. (I’ll stick with my gut and pick Zuckerberg.)

A closing aside on the transcription of “dash”: In his speech, Trump said “super intelligence dash SI.” That’s what you see above, and is my transcription from listening to the video. Several other sites that report the speech (for example, The Verge, CNet, The Hill) insert a typographic dash (“—”) in place of his verbalized “dash.” This is sanewashing—cleaning up Trump’s spoken gaffes to make him sound like a competent, fluent speaker rather than a doddering old man reading a teleprompter like he’s Ron Burgundy… “Damn it, who typed a dash on the teleprompter? For the last time, anything you put on that teleprompter, Trump will read.”

Today is Day 2 of Negroni Week, created by Imbibe Magazine (and sponsored by Campari):

In 2013 Imbibe Magazine launched Negroni Week as a celebration of one of the world’s great cocktails and an effort to raise money for charitable causes around the world.

Since then, Negroni Week has grown from about 120 participating venues to thousands of venues around the world, and to date, the initiative has raised over $5 million for charitable organizations.

As it’s been for the past few years, this year’s charitable organization is Slow Food, which—

… envisions a world where everyone can enjoy food and beverage that is good for them, good for the people who produce it, and good for the planet.

I’ve been celebrating Negroni Week since at least 2015 (X/Twitter link). On Sunday, I kicked it off early—and quite coincidentally—with a Negroni history lesson and a tasting of nearly a dozen variations. More on that soon. Meanwhile, here are links to previous Negroni Week celebrations:

• 2015: Twitter 1, 2
• 2022: Twitter 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
• 2024: JAG’s Workshop, Mastodon
• 2025: JAG’s Workshop, Mastodon 1, 2

The Negroni, as you may have surmised, is one of my favorite cocktails. Its classic form of equal parts gin, Campari, and sweet vermouth is delightful, of course, but what I truly love is that you can use the Negroni as a template for building a variety of drinks that (more or less) follow its equal parts base spirit, bitter, and aromatic modifier structure. Swap the gin for bourbon: my personal favorite, the Boulevardier. Sub out the sweet vermouth for pandan liqueur? A Southeast Asian-inspired Pandan Negroni. Aperol instead of Campari? The lighter, sweeter Contessa. The variations are endless.

Cheers to a good week and a good cause.

Baldur Bjarnason, writing at Out of the Software Crisis under the headline “The LLMentalist Effect: how chat-based Large Language Models replicate the mechanisms of a psychic’s con”:

For the past couple of months, I’ve been working on an idea that I think explains the mechanism of this intelligence illusion.

I now believe that there is even less intelligence and reasoning in these LLMs than I thought before.

Many of the proposed use cases now look like borderline fraudulent pseudoscience to me.

He explains:

By using validation statements, such as sentences that use the Forer effect, the chatbot and the psychic both give the impression of being able to make extremely specific answers, but those answers are in fact statistically generic.

The psychic uses these statements to give the impression of being able to read minds and hear the secrets of the dead.

The chatbot gives the impression of an intelligence that is specifically engaging with you and your work, but that impression is nothing more than a statistical trick.

Bjarnason lays out the six steps of “The Psychic’s Con,” which a supposed psychic will use to con (or “cold read”) their marks, and then matches them with how LLMs are pulling the same trick. It’s a fascinating piece that describes how both psychics and LLMs rely on human psychology to perform their “magic.” From Step 6 of “The LLMentalist Effect”:

6. The marks become cheerleaders

The most enthusiastic believers in an imminent AI revolution are starting to sound very similar to long-time believers in psychics and mind-reading.

They come up with increasingly convoluted ideas and models to explain why the impossible is possible. They become more and more dismissive of fields of science and research that challenge their world view. Their own statements become tinged with awe and dread.

And they keep evangelising. This is real!

Often followed by: This is dangerous!

This seems especially relevant as leading AI chatbot providers call for a slowdown amid fears that AI will destroy humanity.

Oh, did I mention Bjarnason published this in July 2023?

(Via Timothy Perfitt.)

Duane Kuiper, in a statement released on the San Francisco Giants X/Twitter account:

I was recently diagnosed with throat cancer and began treatment last week with my doctors at Stanford Medicine. This cancer is unrelated to the one I experienced five years ago, and I’m optimistic that it will be successfully treated. I’II miss the broadcasts tomorrow and Wednesday as I continue treatment, but I’m looking forward to returning Tuesday and this weekend to celebrate my partner, Mike Krukow, and his remarkable career as he calls his final game before retirement. I’m incredibly grateful for the care I’m receiving and for the tremendous support, from my family, the Giants organization, my broadcast partners and so many others.

Awful news. Throat cancer for a broadcaster is especially cruel. Truly, fuck cancer.

I hope Kuip recovers and is able to grace us with his wonderful voice during the 2027 season and beyond.

I love Susan Kare’s calm demeanor and obvious enthusiasm as she demonstrates what she calls her “baby.” (Timestamped link to 15:26; scroll back a bit to 12:51 to see the full segment, including product manager Jerry Manock describing the basic ergonomic design of Macintosh.)

Don’t forget to feed the lizards.

Apple today released Xcode 27.1 beta, which enables iPhone Duo development, along with Figma and Sketch design kits for iPhone Duo.

Developers, get cracking!

Tyler Stalman compares the new camera against the iPhone 15 Pro, because he’s heard “that the average upgrade cycle for iPhone Pro […] is about three years.” I imagine that’s true for the general iPhone Pro customer, but I’d bet that the people buying an iPhone Pro for the camera—and thus watching Stalman’s review (hi!)—upgrade more often.

Links’ video review (in Mandarin with English subtitles) is very human—polished, but less “produced,” for lack of a better descriptor. Links is a talented travel photographer, and that perspective comes through in his review. Several stunning photos and many comparisons between iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro provide a great feel for the hardware and software improvements in the new camera system.

Jaron Schneider’s written review at PetaPixel—and especially the companion video featuring Schneider, Jordan Drake, and Jason Vong—provides more of the technical details professional (or at least professionally minded) photographers crave. The wealth of example photos, and comparisons between iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro, are especially valuable.

Stunning images and video, as always, by travel photographer Austin Mann, captured this year at Dunton River Camp in southwest Colorado. What I love about Mann’s review is that it captures the feel of the iPhone 18 Pro cameras, not just their technical specs.

Rick Porter, The Hollywood Reporter:

Apple TV had its best ever showing at the Emmy Awards on Monday, topping its previous high mark … from a year ago.

For the first time since it launched in 2019, Apple TV led all outlets at the Emmys with 28 awards (Apple, the parent company, also won for best commercial). A record-setting haul for first-year comedy Widow’s Bay accounted for half of the streamer’s total. The horror-comedy won 14 total awards, breaking the prior record of 13 for a comedy — also set last year by another Apple series, The Studio.

Widow’s Bay won six Emmys during Monday’s telecast, including best comedy series, to go with eight Creative Arts honors. Another first-year show, Pluribus, won six total awards, including drama lead actress (Rhea Seehorn) and best writing for a drama (Vince Gilligan). Margo’s Got Money Troubles, Palm Royale, Slow Horses and Mr. Scorsese accounted for Apple TV’s remaining eight Emmys.

Apple’s closest competitors? HBO, with 21 wins, and Netflix, with 16. Apple TV has truly become “prestige TV.”

I’ll have to give Widow’s Bay a go, despite it being a “horror-comedy.”

See Also: The complete list of winners on the Emmys site.

Jay Willis, writing at Balls and Strikes on the stridently “unhinged” dissent from Justice Samuel Alito (joined by Clarence Thomas) in USPS v. California:

Alito and Thomas could not let this conclusion go unanswered. Alito began his opinion by recasting the rule not as an attempt by Trump to regulate elections per se, but as a coincidentally election-adjacent exercise of the Postal Service’s “broad authority to regulate the mail,” which is, for technical reasons I won’t bore you with here, ostensibly harder to challenge in court. Strangely, the facts that the rule is titled “Ballot Mail for Federal Elections,” and applies to the activities of state “chief election officials,” and says that its primary purpose is protecting the “integrity of federal elections,” and does not implicate any class of mail other than mail-in ballots do not appear anywhere in Alito’s trenchant analysis.

Somehow, the second chunk of Alito’s dissent is even less serious. First, he asserted that the injunction would cause the Trump administration to suffer “irreparable harm” because leaving it in place would “deal a serious setback to the Executive’s goals.” As Alito has done with unsettling frequency over the last several years, he also claimed that the government has a “strong interest” in enforcing the rule in order to “better detect election fraud.”

These claims are equal parts nonsensical and detached from reality.

Justice Alito wrote 2,000 words to basically say “nuh-uh.”