Jordan Mechner, answering a question he gets a lot:

Which is your favorite/definitive version of the original Prince of Persia game?

He runs through the various versions, starting with the one I played incessantly:

The Apple II version was the original. It’s the only version I programmed myself; Prince of Persia’s gameplay, graphics, animation and music were all created on the Apple II. I spent three years sweating over every byte (from 1986 to 1989), so it’s close to my heart in a way no other version can be. That said...

I was surprised to learn the 1990 PC version is Mechner’s preferred variant:

If someone asked me the best way to play old-school PoP online today, I’d likely recommend the DOS version.

He calls the Mac port “terrific” (I, surprisingly, never played it). Of the Super Nintendo version, which I played the heck out of, Mechner wrote in his journal:

Wow! It was like a brand new game. For the first time I felt what it’s really like to play Prince of Persia, when you’re not the author and don’t already know by rote what’s lurking around every corner.

He called playing it a “delighted thrill.”

Mechner also makes passing reference to “Sands of Time,” which I played a lot on my PlayStation 2.

Thirty-five years on, I’m still playing Mechner’s game. Sitting on my PlayStation 5 right now is Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown.

Jayson Stark, writing for The Athletic back in March, examined the results of MLB’s Spring Training test of the Automated Ball Strike (ABS) Challenge System that’s coming next year (main link is paywalled, sorry; here are Apple News+ and Internet Archive links):

Stark spoke with players, managers, and team executives to get their take on the system. My main takeaway is that the system works… for some definition of “works”:

Every hitter, catcher and pitcher has an idea in his head of what a strike is and what a ball is. So for ABS to work — really work — the electronic strike zone has to feel essentially like the zone baseball players have in their heads.

You know what won’t work? If that zone feels just like some sort of technological creation.

So which was it this spring? Uh, let’s just say it’s a work in progress.

Tigers catcher Jake Rogers, on reviewing the ABS results after games:

“It’s crazy,” Rogers said, “because on ABS, you look at the iPad … and (the pitch is) half an inch below the zone. And then we get our report back with the old strike zone, and it’s a full ball in the zone. So it’s like, wow, it looks like a strike. It feels like a strike. And all of a sudden, you’re thinking: Do you challenge, or do you not challenge? So you go back and look at it, and it’s a ball (on ABS).”

Journeyman pitcher, Max Scherzer:

In his recent appearance on the Starkville podcast with me and Doug Glanville, Scherzer said one thing he’d like to see is “a buffer zone, maybe around the challenge system. So hey, if you challenge and it’s in the buffer, the call stands. So you keep human power, the human element, still with the umpire.

“I’m OK changing the call when it’s an egregious call,” the Blue Jays’ future Hall of Famer said. “But when we’re talking about a quarter of an inch that you can’t really detect it, I don’t necessarily know if that makes the game better.”

I agree with Scherzer. It’s great to have the system to correct clearly wrong calls. I’m less enthused about relying on it to make a call based on fractions of an inch—which no human could reliably distinguish in the best of circumstances anyway. If an umpire calls a pitch a ball, and was “wrong” by an eighth of an inch, that’s not a bad call. It’s a human call, and baseball is still a human game.

Stark asks, ”Are we sure this is what we want?”

Do we really want a World Series decided by a pitch that’s literally the width of a hair off the plate? I asked that question of an AL exec. He swatted it away like a piece of lint.

“Maybe just get the call right,” he said.

Stark closes:

What’s the true goal here? What are we trying to accomplish?

Technology is awesome. Robots are the future. And right calls are better than wrong calls. But is the sport truly better off if a World Series gets decided on a pitch 1-78th of an inch outside a robotized strike zone? The answers are so much harder than the questions.

MLB, earlier this week:

Major League Baseball (MLB) today announced that the Automated Ball Strike (ABS) Challenge System has been approved for Major League play by a vote of the Joint Competition Committee. Beginning in 2026, the “Challenge System” will be used in all Spring Training, Championship Season, and Postseason games.

It looks like we’ll have computerized umpires regularly calling balls and strikes before we see a full-time female umpire in the game.

From the “How It Works” section of the announcement:

If a pitcher, catcher, or batter disagrees with the umpire’s initial call of ball or strike, he can request a challenge by immediately tapping on his hat or helmet and vocalizing a challenge. The pitch location is compared to the batter’s strike zone, and if any part of the ball touches any part of the strike zone, the pitch will be considered a strike. The home plate umpire will announce the challenge to the fans in the ballpark and a graphic showing the outcome of the challenge will be displayed on the scoreboard and broadcast. The entire process takes approximately 15 seconds.

The system’s been used at the Triple-A level since 2022, and at the Major League level during this year’s Spring Training and All-Star Game.

Baseball has always been a game of inches. Part of the joy and pain of the game is knowing that an inch here or an inch there can dramatically alter the outcome of an at-bat, a game, or a season. While egregiously bad calls deserve to be challenged and overturned, I’d hate to see the game become a contest of constantly challenged calls of balls and strikes. My love of baseball has already been strained under rule changes I detest. I’m hoping this won’t be one more reason for me to stop caring.

Jimmy Kimmel, returning to his show on Tuesday after his suspension over a pointed joke, quotes Jack Paar upon his return to The Tonight Show 65 years earlier, after walking off in protest over a censored joke.

Different circumstances, of course, but I appreciate that Kimmel (or his people) knows and respects the history of late night talk shows enough to make the reference.

Kimmel’s monologue (6+ million viewers on TV, 18+ million on YouTube) struck exactly the right tone of defiance, conciliation, and emotion. He choked up during his “apology” for last week’s joke, and followed it up with this:

This show is not important. What is important is we get to live in a country that allows us to have a show like this.

I’ve had the opportunity to meet and spend time with comedians and talk show hosts from Russia, countries in the Middle East, who told me they would get thrown in prison for making fun of those in power, and worse […]. They know how lucky we are here. Our freedom to speak is what they admire most about this country. And that’s something I’m embarrassed to say I took for granted until they pulled my friend Stephen off the air, and tried to coerce the affiliates who run our show in the cities that you live in to take my show off the air. That’s not legal, that’s not American, that’s un-American, and it’s so dangerous.

He went hard after Brendan Carr and Donald Trump, and took a dig at Disney while he was at it, reading a “statement” that was one of the “conditions” of his return:

To reactivate your Disney+ and Hulu account, open the Disney app on your smart TV or TV-connected device.

I’ve very rarely paid attention to Kimmel. I have no particular issue with him, beyond not finding him especially entertaining, but I’m glad to see he’s not backing down from this fight.

(Be sure to stick around for a very De Niro appearance by Robert De Niro.)

Brian Steinberg, Variety:

Disney and ABC will bring the comedian back to its schedule starting Tuesday night, after a decision to take his show, “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” off the air for an indefinite period of time. “Last Wednesday, we made the decision to suspend production on the show to avoid further inflaming a tense situation at an emotional moment for our country. It is a decision we made because we felt some of the comments were ill-timed and thus insensitive,” the company said in a statement. “We have spent the last days having thoughtful conversations with Jimmy, and after those conversations, we reached the decision to return the show on Tuesday.”

“We’ve lost more money than Scrooge McDuck has in his vault. Please boycott your local affiliates now.”

Kimmel won’t be back everywhere, though; both Sinclair Broadcast Group and Nexstar are preempting the show. Alex Weprin, The Hollywood Reporter:

“Beginning Tuesday night, Sinclair will be preempting Jimmy Kimmel Live! across our ABC affiliate stations and replacing it with news programming,” the company said in a statement Monday. “Discussions with ABC are ongoing as we evaluate the show’s potential return.”

“We’re negotiating how much ABC will pay us to broadcast the show.”

“In the meantime, we note that Jimmy Kimmel Live! will be available nationwide on multiple Disney-owned streaming products, while our stations will focus on continuing to produce local news and other programming relevant to their respective markets.”

“No matter how hard we try, we can’t stop the signal. Besides, local news is cheaper to produce; someone else writes it, and we just read it.”

Andrew J. Hawkins, The Verge:

Today, the company is launching prepaid passes, in which customers can pay a discounted price in advance on frequently taken trips. Passes will be offered in bundles of 5, 10, 15, or 20 rides, with the bigger bundle earning the bigger discount. Discounts range from 5–20 percent off the average cost of the ride, depending on the number of prepaid passes that are being purchased in advance.

So, Uber’s invented… transit passes?

Uber will market the passes to customers by comparing the single ride fare to a discounted fare when purchased in bulk. For example, a ride from Lower Manhattan to Midtown might cost around $19, but Uber will note that it can be as high as $30 with surge pricing. Customers who purchase passes in bulk won’t have to pay the inflated price, Uber says.

Quite the move from Uber, which controls surge prices, to offer “discounts” based on high surge prices.

It’s the most wonderful time of the year… for Negroni fans. From Imbibe magazine and Campari comes Negroni Week 2025:

For 1 week in September, bars and restaurants will mix classic negronis and negroni variations for a great cause.

That cause is (again) Slow Food:

Slow Food is a global movement of local communities and activists across more than 160 countries seeking to change the world through food and beverage. Slow Food 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.

No doubt there’s a participating venue near you—San Francisco offers 45 locations this year.

Last year I didn’t start until midweek, but I made sure it was on my calendar this year. This will be my tenth Negroni Week (at least!). As I noted last year:

[…] while I don’t need an excuse to tip a Negroni—it’s my favorite “daily drinker” cocktail—I welcome the opportunity.

I also remain an enthusiastic member of the Bitters and Bottles Negroni club. Over the years, they’ve crafted some unconventional concoctions, several of which I’ll revisit this week. To kick things off, I’ve selected their New Age Negroni.

One ounce each of:

• Carpano Bianco Vermouth
• Suncliff Gin
• Suncliff Cultivaro

Combine with lots of ice, stir quickly, and strain into an old fashioned glass with a large sphere or block of ice. Garnish with a twist of orange or grapefruit if you have it.

Enjoy slowly.

James Savage, in his developer blog, A Devlog, on the importance of choosing the right name for your Xcode projects:

For example, a name that can easily be changed doesn’t give me a lot of pause, and this fortunately covers most of the type, property, and method names in a project. It’s always great to choose good names upfront if possible, but sometimes things change, and that’s what refactoring is for. Similarly, names that exist within some sufficiently narrow scope (like a private repository) really only need to make sense to their author. It’s the names that can’t be changed that I worry about.

Xcode helpfully illustrates this duality by asking for both a product name and a bundle identifier as part of its new project form. While it’s tempting to think that the product name matters more here (that’s an app’s brand after all) it’s really the easier of the two to actually change. That’s because, unlike a marketing name, an app’s bundle identifier becomes permanent once submitted to the App Store.

Helpful guidance throughout for all Apple developers.

(In making his point about the immutable nature of bundle identifiers, Savage reminded me of something I’d completely forgotten: the official X/Twitter app was originally created by a third-party developer before being acquired by Twitter in 2010, which is why its bundle identifier remains com.atebits.Tweetie2, betraying its origins as an independent app.)

The main link is to the Reuters story about the summary dismissal of Donald Trump’s $15 billion lawsuit against The New York Times, but what I really wanted to highlight is the dismissal order itself. It’s just four pages and easily skimmed, and is a fantastic takedown of the bloated 85-page complaint Trump’s lawyers filed on his behalf.

Written by United States District Judge Steven D. Merryday, it opens:

As every member of the bar of every federal court knows (or is presumed to know), Rule 8(a), Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, requires that a complaint include “a short and plain statement of the claim showing that the pleader is entitled to relief.”

Civil rights lawyer Joshua Erlich commented on Bluesky:

The court sua sponte dismisses the case for violating Rule 8(a).

So that means the court, all on its own, looked at the complaint and said it’s too long, too scattershot, too arbitrary to even count as a complaint. Never seen this happen to a private party with counsel.

(Apparently, it’s hard to get a complaint struck sua sponte for a Rule 8 violation in federal court. Congratulations to Trump’s legal team on this momentous achievement.)

The order calls the complaint “decidedly improper and impermissible,” where readers “must labor through” the “many, often repetitive, and laudatory (toward President Trump) but superfluous allegations” that are filled with “abundant, florid, and enervating detail.”

It ends:

[…] a complaint remains an improper and impermissible place for the tedious and burdensome aggregation of prospective evidence, for the rehearsal of tendentious arguments, or for the protracted recitation and explanation of legal authority putatively supporting the pleader’s claim for relief. As every lawyer knows (or is presumed to know), a complaint is not a public forum for vituperation and invective — not a protected platform to rage against an adversary. A complaint is not a megaphone for public relations or a podium for a passionate oration at a political rally or the functional equivalent of the Hyde Park Speakers’ Corner.

Unsparing.

Trump was invited to refile his complaint (and will), but it’s clear that Judge Merryday was having none of Trump’s bullshit.

(The lawsuit itself, of course, is also utter bullshit. It’s a classic Trump maneuver: sue for an absurd amount of money, then settle for a smaller number to make the problem “go away.” It’s less direct than demanding a payoff, but equally obvious—a Trumpian lesson in “How to Structure a Bribe.”)

U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission:

This recall involves Anker Power Banks with model numbers A1647, A1652, A1257, A1681 and A1689.

And:

Consumers should immediately stop using the recalled power banks and visit Anker’s Recall Page at https://www.anker.com/rc2506 to verify the product serial number and register for the recall.

If you have recalled products, after registering them, dispose of them safely:

Note: Do not throw this recalled lithium-ion battery or device in the trash, the general recycling stream (e.g., street-level or curbside recycling bins), or used battery recycling boxes found at various retail and home improvement stores. Recalled lithium-ion batteries must be disposed of differently than other batteries, because they present a greater risk of fire.

Anker is offering a full refund or gift card for affected devices.

This is an expansion of 2024’s recall of 2,100 battery packs. Earlier this year, Anker also recalled over a million older PowerCore 10000 (A1263) power banks.

I’ve written of my Anker devotion previously, and I have at least six Anker battery packs. Fortunately, none of them are affected by these recalls (though I do have a smaller capacity variant of the recalled Zolo 20K (A1689); mine is the 10K (A1688) model—I’m using it with caution).

Despite the recalls, I still trust and prefer Anker products. I don’t expect this will dissuade me from buying them in the future.

I hope I’m not burned by that trust.

(If you’re curious about possible technology failures that may have led to these recalls, Alex Hao at LumaField uses the company’s CT scanner to answer “What Went Wrong Inside These Recalled Power Banks?”)

FCC Chair Brendan Carr:

This is a very, very serious issue right now for Disney. We can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to take action on Kimmel or there is going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.

TV Tropes:

A Stock Phrase. The easy way is usually giving in, and the hard way usually involves some kind of violence or torment.

Carr is a cartoonish mob enforcer—and not even an original one.

Moira Donegan, The Guardian:

It is becoming dangerous – life-alteringly so – to tell the truth about the Trump regime, or even just to tell truths that the regime finds unflattering. Theirs is the dream of an insecure child: one of absolute power. They want to rule over us with malignant pettiness, to dispense favors and mercy to their allies and sycophants, and to dispense and encourage punishments to those who displease them. They want to control what we’re allowed to say, what we’re allowed to know. And they want to control what we are allowed to laugh at – certainly, never them.

In the era of absolute monarchy, European countries often had laws on the books banning the mockery of the king. So-called lèse-majesté laws made it treason to insult the “dignity” of the sovereign. The Trump administration seems to have taken this principle – that to mock is serious and punishable – and expanded it, extending the protective circle of the king’s authority outward until it encompasses all of his allies, too.

Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, Karen Attiah, Terry Moran, Matt Dowd… all punished for daring to criticize Trump and his regime. Yet Fox News host Brian Kilmeade—who said of mentally ill homeless people, “Just kill ’em”—still has a job.^[1] We are witnessing government sponsored censorship via mob-style intimidation.

Austin Mann’s camera-focused iPhone review is the only one I eagerly anticipate each year. As always, both his location (Dolomite Mountains in northeastern Italy) and the photos (and video) he captures are simply stunning.

(Mann has a perspective on Cosmic Orange that caused me to briefly reconsider my color choice. He also mentions one iOS 26 feature I missed: using AirPods as a camera remote.)

Brooks Barnes, The New York Times (gift link):

Robert Redford, the big-screen charmer turned Oscar-winning director whose hit movies often helped America make sense of itself and who, offscreen, evangelized for environmental causes and fostered the Sundance-centered independent film movement, died early Tuesday morning at his home in Utah. He was 89.

Everyone has their own, but my two favorite Robert Redford movies are The Sting and The Natural. I love both unreservedly.

The Sting very well may be my first “heist”/“caper” movie, and thus the basis for my love of the entire genre.

The Natural competes with A League of Their Own and Field of Dreams for my favorite baseball movie, but nothing can compete with Redford’s iconic final swing. Gets me every time.

Beyond his unforgettable and illustrious acting career, I’m also grateful for Redford’s Sundance Film Festival, which brought to the world a new generation of filmmakers, several of whom—Quentin Tarantino, Jordan Peele, Rian Johnson, and Ryan Coogler, for example—have made some of my favorite movies.

RIP to “the best there ever was.”

Karl Groethe:

Twenty-five years ago I was an intern at Apple, reviving hundreds of sample code projects and writing new ones to help illustrate how to write programs and use various APIs for Mac OS X developers. […] My favorite creation I called PThreadSorts, a demo that visualized sorting algorithms by scrambling and sorting image pixels. This weekend, with Claude as my AI assistant, I brought it back from the dead.

Karl was on his (I think) third internship at Apple when I started there in 2001—technically he was my first intern, though I hadn’t hired him.

I vividly recall his efforts to modernize sample code then, and I love that he’s doing it again, this time with the help of AI to do the “heavy lifting.” This was a fun read—slightly technical, but very approachable.

(One interesting tidbit: The sample project originally included several Apple marketing images to exercise the sorting algorithms. Today’s Apple includes images created especially for sample code usage—it does not allow the use of any of its copyrighted or trademarked imagery, out of concern for losing legal protection. Apple was a very different company back then.)

Karen Attiah:

Last week, the Washington Post fired me.

The reason? Speaking out against political violence, racial double standards, and America’s apathy toward guns.

Attiah was with the Post for eleven years, where she was their Global Opinions editor and their “last remaining Black full-time opinion columnist.”

Her firing comes after several social media posts where she criticized the “ritualized responses” following Charlie Kirk’s killing:

“the hollow, cliched calls for “thoughts and prayers” and “this is not who we are” that normalize gun violence and absolve white perpetrators especially, while nothing is done to curb deaths.”

Her posts were restrained, and condemned “violence and murder without engaging in excessive, false mourning.”

And yet, the Post accused my measured Bluesky posts of being “unacceptable”, “gross misconduct” and of endangering the physical safety of colleagues — charges without evidence, which I reject completely as false. They rushed to fire me without even a conversation. This was not only a hasty overreach, but a violation of the very standards of journalistic fairness and rigor the Post claims to uphold.

“Democracy Dies in Darkness”—and the Post itself is dousing the light.

(You may recall that Columbia University cancelled Attiah’s course on Race, Media and International Affairs, leading her to launch Resistance Summer School to teach it anyway. The classes (which I attended) were terrific (and will be repeated and expanded—I’m again signed up, for 102). I’m hopeful she’ll now be able to expand further.)

The AI infringement hits keep coming, reports Blake Brittain of Reuters:

Perplexity AI is the latest artificial intelligence company to be hit with a lawsuit by copyright holders alleging infringement after Encyclopedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster accused it of misusing their content in its “answer engine” for internet searches.

The reference companies alleged in New York federal court on Wednesday that Perplexity unlawfully copied their material and diminished their revenue by redirecting their web traffic to its AI-generated summaries.

Elissa Welle at The Verge:

In the lawsuit, the companies allege that Perplexity’s “answer engine” scrapes their websites, steals their internet traffic, and plagiarizes their copyrighted material. Britannica also alleges trademark infringement when Perplexity attaches the two companies’ names to hallucinated or incomplete content.

The 55-page filing (in which the company delightfully spells its name Encyclopædia) is filled with confusing, sometimes circular contentions. For example,

7. Perplexity’s so-called “answer engine” eliminates users’ clicks on Plaintiffs’ and other web publishers’ websites—and, in turn, starves web publishers of revenue […]

That ship has long sailed. People want answers, not just links. Is this much different than me reading an Encyclopedia Britannica article and then summarizing it in a post here? Am I stealing their content and revenue if my page ranks higher than Britannica’s?

That paragraph continues:

[…] To build its substitute product, Perplexity engages in massive copying of Plaintiffs’ and other web publishers’ protected content without authorization or remuneration.

Ah, there’s the rub! Wholesale copying of content is certainly not acceptable. If that’s the complete complaint, consider me convinced.

Welle’s Verge article also notes:

Perplexity plagiarized Merriam-Webster’s definition of the word plagiarize, the lawsuit alleges.

Plagiarizing “plagiarize” is funny. But after reading the actual allegation, I found it—to be kind—rather specious:

74. For example, when a user asked Perplexity, “How does Merriam Webster define plagiarize,” Perplexity spit back the exact definition of the term from Merriam Webster, which is identical to the definition in the print Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary.

What is it they expect to happen here? Should Perplexity not answer? Link to the Merriam-Webster site?

If you asked me this question, and I pulled out a copy of the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary and read the definition to you, am I in violation of copyright? Should I be expected to open the dictionary to the definition and slide the book across the table for you to read yourself?

At best it’s a leading question. At worst, it’s contrived—and the allegation contains several such examples.

What if Perplexity returned a different answer? Well, they’d then be accused of providing inaccurate information while attaching Merriam-Webster’s name:

93. […] Perplexity sometimes generates hallucinations in its outputs and attributes that text to Plaintiffs using Plaintiffs’ trademarks. Perplexity’s use of these marks alongside hallucinations is likely to cause dilution by blurring and/or tarnishing Plaintiffs’ famous marks. In addition, Perplexity’s use of these marks alongside hallucinations constitutes false designations of origin and confuses and deceives Perplexity users into believing (falsely) that the hallucinations are associated with, sponsored by, or approved by Plaintiffs.

In addition to complaining about exact reproductions, and “hallucinations” with their name on it, Britannica also complains that Perplexity’s answers aren’t exactly what Britannica wrote, actually:

94. It omits content from Britannica’s articles that it purports are exact reproductions of such articles.

So Perplexity is wrong for reproducing content exactly, inexactly, and inaccurately. In other words, for reproducing the content at all. Got it.

What’s unclear is whether Britannica would allow any of this behavior if Perplexity were to pay a licensing fee, because it seems Perplexity was happy to do so:

86. In May 2025, Perplexity reached out to Plaintiffs to discuss a potential partnership. The parties had an initial phone call on May 9, 2025 during which Perplexity did not provide any material information regarding the requested partnership, financial or otherwise. After the call, Perplexity requested multiple times that the parties negotiate a non-disclosure agreement before engaging in further substantive discussions. Neither Plaintiff ultimately executed a non-disclosure agreement or participated in any partnerships with Perplexity.

I’m all for Perplexity compensating Encyclopedia Britannica to gain access to its valuable content. And stealing content should be properly punished. Yet this lawsuit is filled with such scattershot arguments, it comes across as more a negotiation ploy than a legitimate complaint.

Robin Williams calls John Ritter up on stage during his first HBO special in 1978. Hilarity ensues.

Release candidates for iOS 26, iPadOS 26, macOS 26, tvOS 26, visionOS 26, watchOS 26, and Xcode 26 now are available, and App Store submissions are now open. (Whew!)

They’ll be available to the public on September 15.

I absolutely love this guy, and I really want to believe he’s an actual Apple Store employee—please don’t shatter my illusions, ThankYouVeryMuch. But, is there anyone unsure about which new iPhone they’re going to buy? (I know, I know. Not the point. “A Guided Tour of the New iPhone Family” gives away the game.)

(I would normally embed the video here, but for reasons unknown, Apple has blocked that option for this video. You’ll have to click through to YouTube.)

I also love the video’s production style. The physical interactions with (seemingly) digital titles is clever, and the kinetic text for the product specs are captivating. Makes me want to try reproducing it in Apple Keynote.

Also, for a brief moment I thought they got Andy Samberg to do a cameo. The character breakdown definitely called for Samberg–esque.

Annelise Levy, reporting for Bloomberg Law:

The federal judge overseeing Anthropic PBC’s proposed $1.5 billion copyright settlement is concerned class lawyers are striking a deal behind the scenes that will be forced “down the throat of authors.”

Judge William Alsup at the hearing said the motion to approve the deal was denied without prejudice, but in a minute order after the hearing said approval is postponed pending submission of further clarifying information.

Several sites (including Bloomberg Law) originally reported this as Judge Alsup flat out denying the proposed settlement rather than postponing approval. Still, things aren’t looking great:

During the first hearing since the deal was announced on Sept. 5, Alsup said he felt “misled” and needs to see more information about the claim process for class members. “I have an uneasy feeling about hangers on with all this money on the table,” he said.

It’s never good when the judge overseeing your case feels “misled.” He also said he was “disappointed” and called the settlement “nowhere close to complete.”

There may also be some very disappointed lawyers:

Alsup admonished class counsel for enlisting an “army” of attorneys to work on the settlement disbursement, including some from the Authors Guild and Association of American Publishers. “Add-on” attorneys won’t be paid from the settlement funds and attorneys fees will be based on how much is paid to class members, he said.

I also foresee this as being a sticking point for some authors:

Alsup instructed the parties to design a claim form that requires anyone with copyright ownership to opt-in to the settlement. If one owner opts out, the work won’t be covered by the settlement.

I doubt authors are willing to lose their rights to a settlement simply because one of their co-authors (or possibly their publisher?) opts out of (or perhaps never opts in to) the claim.

Journalist Nicholas Slayton (New Republic, The Prospect, Motherboard) took NPR to task for writing that a name change to the Department of Defense “will return the department to a name that it carried for much of its history”:

This isn’t correct. The Department of War, for nearly 150 years, was just the Army. There was no unified military cabinet level post overseeing both the Army and Navy until DOD. That umbrella was created in 1947. The Dept of war became the departments of the Army and Air Force.

Clarifying for those who were confused:

Did it carry that name for much of its history as NPR and other outlets are saying? No.

Further:

Yes this is pedantic but the body known as DOD was not widely known as the department of war for much of its history as NPR says.

NPR now has this correction at the bottom of its article:

Correction

Sept. 6, 2025

An earlier version of this story incorrectly said that prior to 1949 the military was overseen by the Department of War. The Army was overseen by the Department of War, but the Department of the Navy oversaw the U.S. Navy and the Marines.

(The Guardian, whose similar language I quoted this weekend—“a callback to the department’s original name used from 1789 to 1947”—has not yet offered a correction, nor have most news outlets reporting the name change as a “return” to a previous name.)

I appreciate both Slayton’s pedantry and NPR’s correction.

Heartbreaking news over the weekend for baseball fans—especially New York Mets fans. Bruce Weber at The New York Times (gift link):

Davey Johnson, one of baseball’s notable iconoclasts, who played in four World Series in six seasons as a second baseman for the Baltimore Orioles and who later managed the Mets to their remarkable Series victory in 1986, died on Friday in Sarasota, Fla. He was 82.

Joe Trezza, MLB:

The Mets turned into a perennial winner under Johnson’s leadership, with Johnson becoming the first National League manager to win at least 90 games in each of his first five seasons.

Davey Johnson was my manager just as I was starting to really pay attention to—and fall in love with—the game. He joined my beloved Mets in 1984, and in ’86 led them to a 108-win season, a heart-stopping NLCS, and what is unquestionably the most memorable World Series ever played.

Johnson was also a decade ahead of his time in his use of computers and statistics to manage. The Times, again:

He was among the first — if not the first — to recognize that computers could be utilized in marshaling baseball’s statistics to have an impact on team building, lineup construction and game strategy.

In an oft-reported story, Johnson took a computer class at Johns Hopkins University between the 1968 and 1969 seasons and, using his teammates’ batting statistics as his data, created a program entitled “Optimization of the Orioles Lineup.” The result suggested that if specific changes were made in the preferred lineup of the Orioles’ decidedly old-school manager, Earl Weaver, the offense would be stronger. This was precisely the kind of analysis that in the intervening years has made sabermetrics, as the study of baseball statistics has come to be known, a crucial element of administering a major league ball club.

His analytical approach gave him the most wins and highest win percentage of any Mets manager.

Alvin Garcia, Heavy.com:

Davey Johnson leaves behind more than numbers. He leaves behind the memory of a manager who embodied swagger, spoke his mind, and gave the Mets their ultimate championship. For fans in Queens, his death marks the end of an era, but also a reminder that his place in Mets lore will never be forgotten.

My friend, former colleague and fellow Mets fan Tom Clark:

He was the real deal. A real baseball guy.

If there’s an afterlife baseball team, Johnson’s my pick to manage it.

RIP.

Alex Reisner at The Atlantic created a tool to search Library Genesis, or LibGen, which contains “[m]illions of books and scientific papers” obtained without permission or compensation. From March, but again relevant following Anthropic’s $1.5 billion settlement with book authors and publishers: LibGen was one of several repositories Anthropic used to train its AI, so there’s a good chance any authors in this database are part of the covered class.

I also recommend Reisner’s companion piece, “The Unbelievable Scale of AI’s Pirated-Books Problem” (paywalled; Apple News+ link), which details how Meta (and OpenAI, and likely many other AI companies) also trained using LibGen.

Joseph Gedeon, The Guardian:

Donald Trump signed an executive order on Friday to rebrand the Department of Defense as the Department of War, a callback to the department’s original name used from 1789 to 1947.

Edwin Starr:

I said “war”

Huh, good god, y’all

What is it good for?

Absolutely nothing

Say it again.

Trump is quoted as saying of the old name:

[…] we decided to go woke and we changed the name to the Department of Defense.

The name was changed in 1949 under notoriously woke President—checks notes—Harry S. Truman.

Rebecca Kheel at Military.com throws a bit of high heat:

The change aligns with the administration’s fixation on “lethality” and a “warrior ethos,” and exemplifies the more aggressive military posture it has been taking, such as its legally questionable military strike on alleged drug smugglers in the Caribbean and deployment of troops to U.S. cities.

Erica L. Green at The New York Times (under one of its customarily wishy-washy headlines) writes:

Mr. Trump, who was granted five deferments from being drafted to fight in Vietnam, including for a diagnosis of bone spurs, said that the country had “never fought to win” a war after World War II, when Congress renamed the Department of War the Department of Defense.

(For the Times, this also counts as “high heat.”)

Continuing:

Critics say the rebranding exposed the hypocrisy behind Mr. Trump’s promises to bring peace.

“He ran as the supposed antiwar candidate, but has proved to be just the opposite,” said Matt Duss, executive vice president at the liberal Center for International Policy. “This stunt underscores that Trump is more interested in belligerent chest-thumping than genuine peacemaking—with dangerous consequences for American security, global standing and the safety of our armed services.”

The Times also notes, almost in passing:

Only Congress can change department names, so the title is ceremonial until it is codified into law.

In other words, it’s a meaningless and peacockish exercise that could cost billions of dollars. Political theater at its most absurd.

(Will any of those contracts go to Trump cronies? Of course they will.)

The Times ends with this:

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has already begun transitioning his office and department with new signs.

And here I thought Hegseth was against transitioning.

Matt O’Brien, AP News:

Artificial intelligence company Anthropic has agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle a class-action lawsuit by book authors who say the company took pirated copies of their works to train its chatbot.

The landmark settlement, if approved by a judge as soon as Monday, could mark a turning point in legal battles between AI companies and the writers, visual artists and other creative professionals who accuse them of copyright infringement.

The company has agreed to pay authors or publishers about $3,000 for each of an estimated 500,000 books covered by the settlement.

“As best as we can tell, it’s the largest copyright recovery ever,” said Justin Nelson, a lawyer for the authors. “It is the first of its kind in the AI era.”

$3,000 per book is substantial for most authors, but the total settlement is relatively insignificant for Anthropic, which, just days earlier, was newly valued at $183 billion. The company was facing fines of up to $150,000 for each of the 7 million books they were found to have pirated—an impossible trillion-dollar penalty. Even the statutory minimum for copyright infringement—$750 per book—would have cost them more than $5 billion. They’re undoubtedly thrilled to escape with “just” a $1.5 billion fine as a price of doing business.

Why are they paying out on 500,000 titles instead of seven million? According to the Authors Guild:

The class is limited to books that (1) have an ISBN or ASIN, (2) were registered with the U.S. Copyright Office within five years of publication, and (3) were registered before Anthropic downloaded them (or within three months of publication). Duplicates of books were removed as well as foreign editions, which often lack ISBNs and/or copyright registration. Further, many books in dataset were never registered with the Copyright Office, or were registered too late to qualify, lacked ISBNs or ASINs.

The lesson for authors: protect your rights and register your books with the Copyright Office.

The lesson for companies: steal it all and pay a minuscule portion of your valuation later.

See Also: The 39-page settlement; The New York Times (gift link); M.G. Siegler’s “cynical” take.

Edwin Black, author of “IBM and the Holocaust,” writing at BESA Center in 2021:

The IBM alliance with the Third Reich was no rogue corporate operation run out of a basement. Day in and day out, it was Watson who personally micromanaged all aspects of the 12-year Nazi relationship. The relationship began just after January 30, 1933—the first moments of the Third Reich—and ended in the first week of May 1945, the last gasp of Hitler’s regime.

Thomas Watson Sr. was IBM’s CEO.

I don’t know what made me think of this today.

Katherine Bunt, Meridith McGraw, and Meghan Bobrowsky, reporting for the Wall Street Journal on this vomitous display of fealty by several “tech titans” (Apple News+ link):

President Trump on Thursday led leaders of the world’s biggest technology companies in a version of his cabinet meetings, in which each participant takes a turn thanking and praising him, this time for his efforts to promote investments in chip manufacturing and artificial intelligence.

“A version of his cabinet meetings” may be as close to snark as WSJ gets.

Among those abasing themselves at the dinner were Mark Zuckerberg (Meta/Facebook), Sam Altman (OpenAI), Sundar Pichai (Alphabet/Google), Arvind Krishna (IBM), and Tim Cook (Apple). Cook fawned:

I want to thank you for setting the tone such that we can make a major investment in the United States and have some key manufacturing here. I think it says a lot about your leadership and focus on innovation.

Was Apple unable to make major investments in the U.S. before Trump?

Then there’s this exchange between Trump and Alphabet (Google) CEO Sundar Pichai:

“You had a very good day yesterday,” Trump said. “Do you want to talk about that big day you had yesterday?”

“I’m glad it’s over,” Pichai said.

“Biden was the one who prosecuted that lawsuit,” Trump said. “You know that, right?”

First, yeah, I think the CEO of the company sued by the Department of Justice is aware of which administration prosecuted the lawsuit.

Second, it’s amusing that even Trump recognizes that Google basically walked away unscathed.

But last, as I wrote in a footnote on Wednesday, the case was indeed prosecuted—and won—under the Biden administration. Trump is so desperate to deflect blame and so afraid of confrontation that he won’t even acknowledge that it was his administration that initiated the case during the waning days of his first administration, despite his own Assistant Attorney General taking a huge victory lap to celebrate the DOJ victory and crediting Trump’s leadership and directive to “Make America Competitive Again” for the win.