The San Francisco Standard staff watched the nine-minute Altman/Ive io intro and then “[broke] down the video in excruciating detail.” They weren’t kidding:

0:35: The video’s first few seconds have the feel of a romantic (bromantic?) comedy’s opening sequence, with the “two friends” navigating thronged streets from separate starting points en route to a cafe meet-up. Unusually thronged, for that part of town, actually. Suspiciously thronged, even …

0:44–1:29: OK, either someone hired a lot of extras to make these streets look hella thronged, or else the mind-blowing technology these superfriends are making is a teleportation device. The same people keep showing up in shots in different locations, sometimes heading in different directions.

Later:

1:19: I cannot believe Ive walked right by Vesuvio and went to Cafe Zoetrope instead.

I had the same thought.

8:56: Let’s take a look at the “special thanks,” or credits(?). Davis Guggenheim, the screenwriter, director, and producer known for “Training Day” (2001), “Waiting for Superman” (2010), “An Inconvenient Truth” (2006) … and “Sam & Jony introduce io” (2025). And you can’t ignore the music: Also thanked is composer Harry Gregson-Williams, who most recently scored “Gladiator 2.” This seems fitting.

The “credits” also include “The Coppola Family”; Francis Ford Coppola owns Cafe Zoetrope (and the building it’s in)—which explains the cafe choice.

Now I’m wondering just how much this thing cost to shoot.

Several could-have-been-productive hours went bye-bye on Saturday when YouTube queue-blocked me with this CBS Mornings video. It’s two weeks old, and the story itself first broke back in January, but it was new to me, and resulted in a dozen open browser tabs that I enthusiastically scrambled through. The (successfully funded) Kickstarter campaign explains the project:

In the 1980s, a bag was discovered filled with dozens of pages of color slides and hundreds of rolls of carefully labeled but unprocessed film. A picker bought it at a public auction and then sold it to a collector. The work reached two Bay Area historians in the 1980s, who meticulously began developing the film to reveal its hidden contents.

It’s been 58 years since a photographer set out to capture the first of thousands of images, but somehow, they were separated from their work. This story is compelling because over half of the film was left unprocessed; most were never seen by the photographer who made them. The work is dated between 1966 and 1970.

The developed photographs contain stunning, “culturally significant” images from seemingly every major event in San Francisco over those five years. The photographer possessed a great eye, technical chops, and first-rate access; either they were a professional with a press card, or an extremely talented amateur with a knack for being in the right place—perhaps both: with about 5,000 already developed images and 75 rolls of film yet to be processed, it’s possible, perhaps even likely, that this is the collective work of more than one person.

I found myself clicking through the project’s subreddit to posts dissecting the most minute of details as internet sleuths scrounged through archives to identify the photographer.

I love so much about this project, from the historical context to the quality of the images to the central mystery. I hope the remaining film is successfully developed and provides better clues to the photographer (or photographers), and that the photos can eventually be exhibited.

Forrest Wickman is an obsessed birder who found himself consumed by a movie mystery, as he chronicles in Slate:

Like any generous viewer—I consider myself one—you learn to suspend your disbelief. The same way you learn to accept that every phone number in every movie starts with 555, if you’re a birder, you learn to accept that every bald eagle in every movie screeches like a red-tailed hawk.

I maintained this policy throughout my early birdpilling. But then I watched the original movie adaptation of Charlie’s Angels, and I found myself staring down one of the greatest mysteries of recent cinema.

You see, there’s a scene in that movie that tormented me, that kept me up at night, and that lately has had me interrogating a wide variety of seemingly devoted, and certainly well-compensated, filmmaking professionals. That’s because the bird in Charlie’s Angels is, I believe, the wrongest bird in the history of cinema—and one of the weirdest and most inexplicable flubs in any movie I can remember. It is elaborately, even ornately wrong. It has haunted not just me but, as I’d later learn, the birding community at large for almost a quarter of a century.

So, naturally, being an all-in sort of person, I embarked upon a wild-goose chase to investigate how and why this monstrosity took flight. I talked to script doctors and scoured legal statutes. I interviewed leading ornithological experts and electronically analyzed birdcalls, all to figure out who laid this giant egg. It took nearly a year. But eventually, I discovered why hundreds of people with a budget of nearly $100 million failed to accurately portray a single bird. The answer was most fowl.

The most exhilarating story I’ve read all week, with several mystery-worthy twists that kept me riveted to the end. A superb bird-dogging effort by Wickman.

The Sunday Times (London) has an extended excerpt of Patrick McGee’s Apple in China. In my link to Jon Stewart’s terrific interview with McGee, I noted “Apple both enabled and encouraged its China suppliers to build components for Apple competitors”; the excerpt gives the details:

The ripple effect from Apple’s investments across Chinese industry was accelerated by a rule imposed by Apple that its suppliers could be no more than 50 per cent reliant on the tech giant for their revenues. This was to ensure that a supplier wouldn’t go bust overnight if a new Apple design did away with components it manufactured. So as iPhone volumes soared from under ten million units on its launch in 2007 to more than 230 million in 2015, Apple would encourage its suppliers to grow their non-Apple business just as quickly. The upshot of this policy was that Apple gave birth to the Chinese smartphone industry.

In 2009 most smartphones sold in China were produced by Nokia, Samsung, HTC and BlackBerry. But as Apple taught China’s supply chain how to perfect multi-touch glass and make the thousand components within the iPhone, those suppliers took what they knew and offered it to Chinese companies led by Huawei, Xiaomi, Vivo and Oppo. Result: the local market share of such brands grew from 10 per cent in 2009 to 35 per cent by 2011, and then to 74 per cent by 2014, according to Counterpoint Research. It’s no exaggeration to say the iPhone didn’t kill Nokia; Chinese imitators of the iPhone did. And the imitations were so good because Apple trained all its suppliers.

To get this message to Beijing, Tim Cook and his deputies visited Zhongnanhai, the citadel of communist power near the Forbidden City, in May 2016. They explained that Apple wasn’t just creating millions of jobs; it supported entire industries by facilitating an epic transfer of “tacit knowledge”– hard-to-define but practical know-how “in the art of making things”, as defined by the China-born Federal Reserve economist Yi Wen, who believes that such knowledge was “the secret recipe” behind Britain’s Industrial Revolution.

A former Apple executive says this message was “music to the ears of China”. Beijing had spent decades trying to catch up with the West’s lead in advanced industry, scientific research and economic might. It often resorted to spying, outright theft or coercive tactics. But here was America’s most famous tech giant willingly playing the role of Prometheus, handing the Chinese the gift of fire.

(Via Daring Fireball.)

I watched Jon Stewart’s fantastic interview with Patrick McGee, author of Apple in China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company, with my mouth agape. McGee’s book reveals how Apple unintentionally helped build China’s high-tech electronics manufacturing dominance, and how that dominance is now hurting Apple, the U.S., and possibly the world.

Stewart clearly did his homework with this book, and McGee enthusiastically plays to Stewart’s knowledge of the topic. It’s more conversation than interview.

The numbers and details in McGee’s book are, to use Stewart’s description, jaw-dropping: 28 million workers trained by Apple in China since 2008 (larger than California’s entire labor force); investments of $55 billion a year (the U.S. CHIPS Act, meant to bring this type of high tech manufacturing back to America, is $52 billion over four years); 3 million people in China assembling Apple devices.

What boggled my mind was learning that Apple both enabled and encouraged its China suppliers to build components for Apple competitors, as a way of ensuring those suppliers didn’t go bankrupt as Apple refined devices and eliminated components. Those Apple suppliers helped build China’s electronics intellectual know-how, which they now use to build top-tier smartphones, electric vehicles—and, yes, military weaponry.

Indeed, McGee theorizes that Apple’s foray into low-cost manufacturing and its education of China’s high-tech workforce over the last twenty-five years may be “facilitating the potential annexation of Taiwan,” a notion that blew both Stewart’s and my mind. It’s a scary and potentially deadly object lesson in the law of unintended consequences.

Apple has placed itself in a no-win bind. They need to reduce their dependence on China, but can’t do so easily. Yet by staying in China, they expose themselves to the capricious whims of an autocratic leader with tremendous power over their financial well-being.

(Yes. Precisely.)

Stewart’s interview enticed me to download McGee’s book, more than any written review did. If you want that written review, though, Hannah Beech has a solid one for The New York Times (but I found Stewart’s interview incredibly compelling and infinitely more entertaining).

(One nit with the Times review: Beech writes—

There are a few Chinese misspellings and miscues — the surname Wang is not, in fact, pronounced quite as “Wong.”

My China-born wife—surname Wang and, in fact, pronounced quite as “Wong”—would like a word.)

(If you’re thinking about buying the book, please consider using one of these affiliate links: Amazon, Apple Books, Bookshop. Your purchases help support the site. Thanks!)

Redditor /u/southrncadillac demonstrates a wild and extremely clever use of the Vision Pro by placing 3D objects in virtual space to use as tracking points in physical space—enabling them to walk around a house and identify the same physical point from multiple rooms, leveraging the Vision Pro’s rock-steady and surprisingly accurate spatial tracking. It’s like gaining the ability to see through walls and floors.

Someone should make a dedicated app for this. It might be a device-seller.

(Be sure to turn on audio, or you will be completely confused.)

(Via @Denisvengeance.)

Oh You Pretty Things:

Dieter Rams turns 93 on May 20th. Every year on Dieter Rams’ birthday, we stream “Rams” free worldwide!

Available through today (May 21), according to BoingBoing, which also reminds us of Rams’ design impact:

Even if you don’t know his name, you likely know of his beautifully austere designs for Braun audio and houseware designs from the 1950s through the 1990s. His philosophy of “less, but better” (Weniger, aber besser) and his ten principles of good design have profoundly influenced modern industrial design, most notably through his impact on Apple’s Jonathan Ive.

Timely, given today’s Jony Ive news.

The announcement (with a lovely nine-minute video that doubles as an ode to San Francisco) is light on details, but heavy on aspiration:

The io team, focused on developing products that inspire, empower and enable, will now merge with OpenAI to work more intimately with the research, engineering and product teams in San Francisco.

As io merges with OpenAI, Jony and LoveFrom will assume deep design and creative responsibilities across OpenAI and io.

It’s a $6.5 billion, all-stock deal. I can’t help but wonder if this increases the chances of Apple acquiring (or partnering more deeply with) OpenAI—or makes it less likely.

Ive:

I have a growing sense that everything I have learned over the last 30 years has led me to this moment. While I am both anxious and excited about the responsibility of the substantial work ahead, I am so grateful for the opportunity to be part of such an important collaboration. The values and vision of Sam and the teams at OpenAI and io are a rare inspiration.

Altman:

What it means to use technology can change in a profound way. I hope we can bring some of the delight, wonder and creative spirit that I first felt using an Apple Computer 30 years ago.

This merger feels momentous, like an anointing of a new generation of tech leadership by a vanguard of the previous one. I enjoy making fun of Altman, but I get the sense that Ive believes he’s found his next Steve Jobs.

Whatever device comes of this partnership will rocket to the top of my Want It! list.

Alex Williams, New York Times:

George Wendt, who earned six consecutive Primetime Emmy Award nominations for his role as the bearish, beer-quaffing Everyman Norm Peterson on the enduring sitcom “Cheers,” died on Tuesday morning at home in Studio City, Calif. He was 76. […]

Over more than four decades, Mr. Wendt racked up about 170 film and television credits. But he was best known for “Cheers.” He appeared on every episode of the sitcom during its 11-year run on NBC, which began in 1982. His streak of Emmy nominations for outstanding supporting actor in a comedy series began in 1984.

I completed my first rewatch of Cheers a few months ago, and Wendt’s Norm was, by a significant margin, my favorite character. Wendt exuded warmth and charisma, and Norm’s deadpan quips as he made his way to his bar perch always cracked me up. (“It’s a dog-eat-dog world, Sammy, and I’m wearing Milk-Bone underwear.” Or, “How’s a beer sound, Norm?” “I dunno. I usually finish them before they get a word in.”)

Mike Barnes and Duane Byrge, The Hollywood Reporter:

He received Emmy nominations for outstanding supporting actor in a comedy series for six consecutive years (1984–89, from the second season to the seventh, but lost out to Pat Harrington Jr. of One Day at a Time in 1984, to John Larroquette of Night Court from 1985–88 and to castmate Woody Harrelson in 1989.

It surprises me that he never won an Emmy for this role. He created one of the most enduring characters of the mid-’80s.

I’ll raise a beer in Wendt’s memory today. 

Norm!

David Brooks wrote a wonderful article for The Atlantic last year on the idea of “late bloomers” and why they succeed later in life, especially in comparison to the more popular notion of “early bloomers” who experience their success at a young age. (Apple News+ link.)

Brooks leads with a story about Paul Cézanne, who achieved success late in his life and career, and cites other well-known figures with similar “delayed” success (Morgan Freeman and Colonel Harland Sanders, for example). He uses them as a springboard to explore why some people “peak” later. He writes:

It turns out that late bloomers are not simply early bloomers on a delayed timetable—they didn’t just do the things early bloomers did but at a later age. Late bloomers tend to be qualitatively different, possessing a different set of abilities that are mostly invisible to or discouraged by our current education system.

Brooks identifies eight traits “that tend to distinguish late bloomers from early bloomers.” All resonated with me—these five especially so—each of which I might immodestly attribute to myself, to varying degrees (but that’s a topic for a future article!):

• Intrinsic motivation.

People driven by intrinsic motivation […] are bad at paying attention to what other people tell them to pay attention to.

[…]

But such people can be great at paying attention to things that do interest them. The intrinsically motivated have a strong need for autonomy. They are driven by their own curiosity, their own obsessions […].

He also writes that intrinsically motivated people:

[…] are self-directed and often obsessed, burying themselves deep into some subject or task. They find learning about a subject or doing an activity to be their own reward, so they are less likely to cut corners.

• “Diversive curiosity.”

Many late bloomers endure a brutal wandering period, as they cast about for a vocation.

[…]

During these early periods, late bloomers try and then quit so many jobs that the people around them might conclude that they lack resilience. But these are exactly the years when the late bloomers are developing what psychologists call “diversive curiosity”—the ability to wander into a broad range of interests in a manner that seems to have no rhyme or reason.

[…]

They walk through life like a curious person browsing through a bookstore.

• The ability to self-teach.

Successful autodidacts start with what psychologists call a “high need for cognition”—in other words, they like to think a lot.

[…]

Successful late bloomers combine this high need for cognition with a seemingly contradictory trait: epistemic humility. They are aggressive about wanting to acquire knowledge and learn—but they are also modest, possessing an accurate sense of how much they don’t know. This mentality combines high self-belief (I can figure this out on my own; I know my standards are right and the world’s standards are wrong) with high self-doubt (There’s a lot I don’t know, and I am falling short in many ways).

The combination of a high need for cognition and epistemic humility is a recipe for lifelong learning. Late bloomers learn more slowly but also more deeply precisely because they’re exploring on their own. 

• The mind of the explorer.

[…] the best moments of life can be found within the lifelong learning or quest itself. It’s doing something so fulfilling that the work is its own reward. “Effort is the one thing that gives meaning to life,” the Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck once wrote. “Effort means you care about something.”

• Wisdom.

Wisdom is a complicated trait. It starts with pattern recognition—using experience to understand what is really going on. The neuroscientist Elkhonon Goldberg provides a classic expression of this ability in his book The Wisdom Paradox. “Frequently when I am faced with what would appear from the outside to be a challenging problem, the grinding mental computation is somehow circumvented, rendered, as if by magic, unnecessary,” he writes. “The solution comes effortlessly, seamlessly, seemingly by itself. What I have lost with age in my capacity for hard mental work, I seem to have gained in my capacity for instantaneous, almost unfairly easy insight.”

But the trait we call wisdom is more than just pattern recognition; it’s the ability to see things from multiple points of view, the ability to aggregate perspectives and rest in the tensions between them. 

The remaining traits (Early screw-ups, The ability to finally commit, Crankiness in old age) offered several more nods of recognition, and there’s a lot more to each trait than even the extensive pull quotes above. Brooks’ piece is an enlightening read, especially if, like me, you’re constantly contemplating your own “what’s next.”

David Smith, writing for The Guardian:

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

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

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

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

Fuck—and I mean this sincerely—cancer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Back to the ProPublica piece:

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

[…]

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

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

[emoluments]:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For example, on Altman’s olive oil usage:

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

Altman sizzles with Drizzle.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

O’Shaughnessy sounds fascinating:

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

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

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

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

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

(Via @briankrebs → @amydiehl.)

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

ESPN:

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

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

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

Until he bet on baseball.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dash asks:

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

He further wonders:

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

His conclusion echoes mine:

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

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

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

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

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

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

John Sobanski:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Atlantic piece leads off with this historic context:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Back to Epstein’s piece in The Atlantic:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

$835.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[…]

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

Bracken, again:

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

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

Why indeed.

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

Jacob Collier, on YouTube:

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

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

Apple:

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

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

AAPL currently down more than 2.75%.

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

My family is fleeing the country.

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

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

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

• Successful consolidation of power by the autocrat

• Failure of opposition to coalesce

• There is little hope of meaningful recovery

• Destruction of government capability

• A significant risk of genocide aimed at transgender people

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Of concern:

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

And Elon Musk has full access to the SSA database.

On my concerns regarding the “when” question:

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

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

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

Her conclusion contains this stark anecdote and advice:

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

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