Rob Sheffield, writing for Rolling Stone, on Sly Stone:

Nobody ever sounded like this man. Sly could write inspirational songs of unity, anthems like “I Want to Take You Higher” that would turn a live crowd into a euphoric tribe, or uplifting hits like “Stand!” or “Everybody Is a Star” that can catch you in a lonely moment and make you feel like the rest of your life is a chance to live up to the song’s challenge.

And:

“The concept behind Sly and the Stone,” he told Rolling Stone in 1970, “I wanted to be able for everyone to get a chance to sweat. By that I mean … if there was anything to be happy about, then everybody’d be happy about it. If there was a lot of money to be made, for anyone to make a lot of money. If there were a lot of songs to sing, then everybody got to sing. That’s the way it is now. Then, if we have something to suffer or a cross to bear — we bear it together.”

Sly and the Family Stone was a staple in our homes. Almost any track would spark adults and children alike to leap from our seats and shimmy around the living room: “Hot Fun in the Summertime,” “Everyday People,” “Dance to the Music”…. I was too young to understand the meaning behind the music, of course—they were just all high energy bops.

(So embedded in my brain is his music, that the phrase “it’s a family affair…” is only ever voiced in the style of the chorus.)

I was also quite unaware of his drug use and reclusiveness—he was just the funky frontman for the songs of my youth.

Joe Coscarelli’s New York Times obituary ends:

Asked in the final pages of his autobiography if there was one thing that people could take from his life, Mr. Stone replied, “Music, just music.”

Thank you for the music, Sly.

This Wall Street Journal, report (Apple News+) by Suzanne Vranica, Dana Mattioli, and Jessica Toonkel directly accuses Elon Musk and X/Twitter’s CEO Linda Yaccarino of engaging in an “advertise or be sued” scheme:

Late last year, Verizon Communications got an unusual message from a media company that wanted its business: Spend your ad dollars with us or we’ll see you in court.

The threat came from X, the social-media platform that has been struggling to resuscitate its ad business after many corporate advertisers fled over concerns about loosened content-moderation standards following Elon Musk’s $44 billion purchase in late 2022.

It worked. Verizon, which hadn’t advertised on X since 2022, pledged to spend at least $10 million this year on the platform, a person familiar with the matter said.

Fashion company Ralph Lauren also agreed to resume buying ads on X after receiving a lawsuit threat, people familiar with the matter said. All told, at least six companies that had either received lawsuit threats or were motivated in part by pressure tactics have struck ad deals with X, according to people familiar with the negotiations. The agreements include both firm ad-spending commitments and nonbinding targets.

The legal threats are part of an extraordinary pressure campaign that Musk and X CEO Linda Yaccarino launched to boost revenue by cajoling advertisers—including Amazon, Unilever, Pinterest and Lego—to spend money on their platform.

Normal people might call that “extortion.” That word is nowhere to be found here—but how can we not draw that conclusion?

In a functioning democracy, such baldfaced attempts at a shakedown would be laughed at by everyone, from the CEOs to the judges, and some Attorney General would be gleefully making their bones prosecuting Musk, Yaccarino, and anyone else at X/Twitter involved in this advertise-or-be-sued scheme.

We are clearly not in a functioning democracy.

This use of lawsuits to coerce money or obedience is straight out of Donald Trump’s playbook. It’s effective only because of the massive financial and political clout they wield. Without either, they’re little more than weak, petulant whiners.

I mean, weaker, more petulant whiners.

The lawsuits the WSJ references aren’t new, nor are the accusations; in February, after Apple resumed advertising on X/Twitter, I wrote (under the still-too-soft headline After a Year-Long Pause, Apple Resumes Advertising on the Anti-Democracy, Nazi-Supporting X/Twitter):

This latest act of acquiescence is clearly meant to curry favor with Trump and co-President Musk^[1] out of fear of retaliation—especially from Musk, who’s actively suing companies who stopped advertising on X/Twitter^[2]. No doubt Cook and Co. are hoping to avoid that, making the resumption of ads a bribe to Musk—or, if you’d like to be more generous to Apple, a payoff coerced through blackmail and extortion.

Worth remembering: in 2023, Musk told advertisers to “go fuck yourself” at The New York Times Dealbook Summit:

Don’t advertise. If someone is going to try and blackmail me with advertising? Blackmail me with money? Go fuck yourself. Go fuck yourself, is that clear?

It was. They stopped. So he decided he’d do the “blackmailing with money.”

Bill Atkinson, a wellspring of innovation who invented technologies and user interfaces that were foundational to the software we still use today, died Thursday of pancreatic cancer, his family announced over the weekend. He was 74.

I don’t know how many times I’ve said it, but with feeling: Fuck. Cancer.

There are dozens of wonderful remembrances of this remarkable man, including from Tim Cook and a lovely one from Joy of Tech; many are captured on MJ Tsai’s blog.

Bill Atkinson was one of the legendary names Apple fans whispered in awe.

I met Bill when he attended a DTS lab to work on his app, PhotoCard. I admit I was a bit starstruck, as were many others in that room, I’d imagine. It’s likely the DTS team learned more from him that visit than he did from us. He had with him a copy of his book, Within the Stone, a beautiful hardcover “filled with full-page close-up color photos of the colors and designs found inside polished rocks and minerals.” The book is now, sadly, out of print. Before he left the lab, he signed it: Best wishes to Apple DTS. Bill Atkinson.

Thanks for everything, Bill.

Though I enjoyed the stage production of Wicked: The Musical when it came to San Francisco a decade or so ago, and listened to the soundtrack dozens of times over the years, I’ve always felt the show sagged in the second act, so I was deeply skeptical when I heard the film adaptation would be split in two, one movie per act.

My trepidation subsided somewhat after finally watching Wicked: Part I several weeks ago. Jon M. Chu created a delightful first act, with simply stunning design and cinematography, while Ariana Grande and (especially) Cynthia Erivo were revelations. But still—a full film focused on the weaker half sounded like a terrible idea.

The trailer for part two, Wicked: For Good, suggests my fears may be unfounded. It looks fantastic—everything that made part one an instant classic, plus extra runtime to give the creeping totalitarianism, nature of “evil,” and united-against-an-enemy propaganda themes some room to breathe.

November seems so far away.

On Monday, Austin Karp at Sports Business Journal reported a tantalizing morsel of baseball news:

Apple TV is emerging as potentially the leading streamer to land some of the MLB media rights currently resting with ESPN […]

A source tells SBJ the offer from Apple would likely be more than what NBC would be eyeing, particularly if that package was focused on simply Sunday night rights.

After MLB whiffed the opening day streams and the news that it was jointly ending its partnership with ESPN, I snarkily suggested that MLB might welcome a call from Apple.

This report gives me hope that Apple may have made that call, and I, for one, would be here for the results—especially if it means bringing full-game, “immersive” baseball to Apple Vision Pro. Apple’s Friday Night Baseball offers a high-quality production (the announcers bug me, though), and the few minutes of baseball I’ve watched in this immersive environment makes me yearn for more in this format.

Karp reports that “no decisions have been made yet” but I’m crossing my fingers Apple and MLB can tie this one up.

Andrew J. Hawkins, writing for The Verge:

Last month, Uber started testing new accounts for senior citizens, with a larger typeface, fewer buttons, and easier-to-follow instructions. Now, the company is ready to roll out its new senior accounts to the wider world. […]

Customers who want the enhanced experience — larger font, reduced complexity, and clearer navigation — but aren’t linked to a family account can also turn on the app’s Simple Mode in the Account section.

I enabled “Simple Mode” to see what it was like. I expected giant buttons with pictures, like Apple’s At Ease or Simple Finder from back in the earlies. 

Nope.

Take a look at these two images:

The first image is Uber’s “Normal” mode:

• Two tabs (Ride, Eat)
• A Where to? field, with an embedded “Later” button
• Eight “Suggestions” of things you might want to do ( Ride, Reserve, Courier, Rental Cars, Group Ride, Store Pickup, Seniors, Food)
• An “Eat like a local” section

Compare with the second image, Uber’s “Simple” mode:

• An unadorned Get a ride field
• Three “Shortcuts” (recently used locations)
• Three “Services” (Get a ride, Reserve a ride for later, Get package delivered)

This is so much better! It’s cleaner, less cluttered.

Senior/Simple mode shouldn’t be an option you turn on; it’s what the default Uber experience should be. It deshitifies the app. If Uber wants the extended options, offer a “Complicated” mode for the small percent of people who want to be overwhelmed with choice.

If you prefer this more usable interface, go to Account > Settings > Accessibility > Simple Mode, and then enable the “Turn on a simplified version of the app” option. Et voilà! Reduced clutter.

By labeling this useful-for-everyone mode as “Senior” or “Simple,” and then hiding it behind an Accessibility option, Uber knowingly buries it while placing a stigma on it. The company doesn’t want you using this mode, because it’s purely functional: primarily ride-hailing, plus package delivery.

Uber’s normal mode, on the other hand, isn’t focused on functionality: it’s a marketing screen. It exists to put Uber Eats and Courier and Rental Cars in your face. It’s designed to entice you into clicking on and using these additional services. More services, more revenue.

Senior mode offers other functionality:

Seniors can also designate a family member or caregiver who can book rides, change settings, and contact drivers if need be. And they can opt into sharing their location so the aforementioned caregivers and family members can track their movements.

Once again, these are not just helpful for seniors, they’re genuinely useful additions that can benefit everyone. I should be able to book rides on behalf of any family member (or friend), regardless of their age. Likewise, my friend with an autistic adult daughter would love to manage Uber rides on her behalf.

Marketing these features as for “Seniors” instead of making it the default is short-sighted, ageist, and ableist. Uber should make them available to everyone without placing such constraining labels on them.

Apple Worldwide Developer Relations:

Every year, the Apple Design Awards recognize innovation, ingenuity, and technical achievement in app and game design. But they’ve also become something more: A moment to step back and celebrate the work of Apple developers across the community.

Six categories, each with an App and Game winner and several finalists.

Gone is the Spatial Computing category introduced last year—which is not to say there are no Apple Vision Pro apps. Seven of the 33 winners and finalists have a Vision Pro version; five are Vision Pro only; one—Taobao, basically China’s Amazon.com—won its category (Apps - Interaction).

On the flip side, while 12 apps have a Mac version, only four are Mac-only. One did take home the top prize for Social Impact - Games, though (Neva). Gotta showcase those Mac-only games, right?

I’m always pleased when apps I use land on the ADA list. This year, that’s Balatro, an addiction I only recently tamed, and iA Writer, which I use to write the words you’re now reading.

(Balatro also wins the unofficial platform ubiquity contest: it’s the only one supporting iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV, and Apple Vision Pro—missing only an Apple Watch app.)

I’ve briefly used CellWalk and Mela, and have passing familiarity with Thank Goodness You’re Here!, Watch Duty (because of the LA fires), and Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown (I played a bit on my Playstation 5, but didn’t know there was a Mac version). The rest are all new to me. I’m especially excited to play Gears & Goo—I love a good tower defense game, and I need more reasons to use my Vision Pro.

As I read through the list, I flashed back to the in-person Apple Design Awards ceremonies of yesteryear, and realized how much I miss them. John Geleynse and Shaan Pruden from WWDR would host (often in formal attire, as befits an awards show), and each app (and its creators) would be spotlighted for a couple of minutes during a (usually live) demo. The energy in the room was always electric: Apple developers are a supportive community, and they cheered each winner as if it were their own app up on stage.

The pandemic took so much away from us.

Sebastiaan de With—co-founder and designer at Lux, which makes beautiful camera apps—lets his imagination run wild ahead of WWDC’s expected unveiling of a long-rumored Apple UI redesign:

What would I do if I were Apple’s design team? What changes would I like to see, and what do I think is likely? Considering where technology is going, how do I think interface design should change to accommodate? Let’s take a look at what’s (or what could be) next.

de With first catalogs the iOS design “epochs” before revealing his “take on the New Age,” calling his design language “Living Glass”:

I’d like to imagine what could come next. Both by rendering some UI design of my own, and by thinking out what the philosophy of the New Age could be. […]

Philosophically, if I was Apple, I’d describe this as finally having an interface that matches the beautiful material properties of its devices. All the surfaces of your devices have glass screens. This brings an interface of a matching material, giving the user a feeling of the glass itself coming alive.

The designs de With showcases are beautiful, compelling, and completely plausible—very much inline with Apple’s recent designs for new apps (see, for example, the Invites app).

Something to look forward to on Monday.

Nine years ago tonight, Muhammad Ali died.

I remember being devastated, not because I was a huge fan of boxing, but because Ali was so sweet to watch. He was the only boxer who seemed like he was having fun in the ring—he was certainly enjoying himself outside of it.

When the news broke, I flashed immediately to his unexpected appearance at the Olympics. I wrote:

I have only a few enduring sports images in my head. One of them is of Ali, surprising the world by lighting the Olympic flame during the 1996 Atlanta Olympics.

His shaking left arm, as he grasps his unlit torch in his right. His clear determination to make this moment happen. The moment he raises both arms over his head, his torch now lit, as he basks, briefly but knowingly, in the crowds’ adoration, before carefully, carefully lowering his torch to light the cauldron.

The world knew what this moment meant, and it roared its approval as Ali appeared.

I still haven’t forgotten that moment (though my recollection then was slightly faulty).

After Ali’s appearance, George Vecsey wrote in his Sports of the Times column:

Muhammad Ali floats above the Summer Games, no longer an elusive butterfly but a great glowing icon as large as a spaceship. He casts his light on every athlete, every spectator, every volunteer, all the people who walk these humid streets with just a little more zip in their step, now that they have seen Ali. The whole world gasped in shock early yesterday when Ali suddenly materialized on that platform at the far end of Olympic Stadium, the perfect choice to light the cauldron.

Who would have thought of Ali? Who would have predicted he could stand in front of the world, his body slowed by Parkinson’s syndrome, and hold a flaming torch and transfer searing fire to a contraption that would raise the fire to the cauldron?

Putting the old rascal-prophet on the official pedestal raised the tempo of these 17 days. Let the Games begin, indeed.

I went back and read several of Ali’s obituaries. Sports Illustrated offered a wonderful photo essay of the 100 Greatest Photos of Muhammad Ali.

(The first photo—the one you undoubtedly think of when you think “photograph of Ali,” of him standing over Sonny Liston, yelling, arm cocked—turned sixty a few days ago.)

From Robert Lipsyte at The New York Times:

Ali was the most thrilling if not the best heavyweight ever, carrying into the ring a physically lyrical, unorthodox boxing style that fused speed, agility and power more seamlessly than that of any fighter before him.

But he was more than the sum of his athletic gifts. An agile mind, a buoyant personality, a brash self-confidence and an evolving set of personal convictions fostered a magnetism that the ring alone could not contain. He entertained as much with his mouth as with his fists, narrating his life with a patter of inventive doggerel.

Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee. His hands can’t hit what his eyes can’t see.

Still the people’s champ.

AP News:

In a lengthy note posted to her official website on Friday, Swift announced: “All of the music I’ve ever made now belongs to me.”

The pop star said she purchased her catalog of recordings — originally released through Big Machine Records — from their most recent owner, the private equity firm Shamrock Capital. She did not disclose the amount.

Billboard:

According to sources, Shamrock sold Swift’s catalog back to her for an amount relatively close to what they paid for it — which sources tell Billboard was around $360 million.

Congratulations to Swift. As Prince said, “If you don’t own your masters, your master owns you.”

I went to Swift’s site to read the message, and it was a photo of a handwritten letter with tiny text, effectively unreadable to me.

And that’s how I learned I’m not Taylor’s target audience.

The team behind her site is aware of the concept of “accessibility”; they have an Accessibility link at the bottom (which is effectively meaningless legal pablum, really). The image includes an alt tag, but it says only “Handwritten letter from Taylor”—not exactly helpful. The image also includes an aria-describedby tag containing the full text of the letter—but it’s available only to screen readers. Those of us capable of reading the screen without a screen reader, but who struggle to read tiny text, are left to fumble our way through.

Tiny on-screen content is one reason I’ve enabled three features on my Mac: 

1. In Apple menu > System Settings > Accessibility > Use scroll gesture with modifier keys to zoom
2. In Apple menu > System Settings > Accessibility > Hover text
3. In Safari > Settings > Advanced > Never use font sizes smaller than 10

As configured on my Mac, I can press the Control ⌃ key and swipe up and down on my mouse or trackpad to zoom in and out of the screen; or hover over text or UI elements and press the Control ⌃ key and get a zoomed-in overlay. It makes it a lot easier to read on-screen content that’s clearly meant for much younger eyes.

Denise Petski at Deadline:

The season 14 revival picks up several years after we last saw the Hill family – Hank and Peggy Hill are now retired and return to a changed Arlen after years of working in Saudi Arabia; and Bobby is 21 and living his best life while navigating adulthood as a chef in Dallas.

A ten-episode run, coming August 4. King of the Hill ran for 13 seasons starting in 1997—over 250 episodes. I only watched the first three or four seasons, but I remember enjoying it immensely at the start. I still remember the theme song and all the voices—and of course Hank’s “propane and propane accessories.” No idea why I stopped. It is from Mike Judge, and I did find Beavis and Butthead cringe, and I’ve never watched Silicon Valley because it seemed too close to my lived experience, and it did take me until 2022 to watch (and love!) Office Space…. 

Maybe I’ll give it a rewatch.

(Also, today I realized Kathy Najimy is 68. In my head, she’s still her late-30s Veronica’s Closet self.)

A third installment officially makes A Knives Out Mystery a series. I loved Knives Out; I’ve watched it three or four times, and it accomplishes something most mystery movie rewatches don’t: it remains fun to watch. (I have yet to see Glass Onion, but I hear it’s just as good.) Writer and director Rian Johnson assembles another stacked cast alongside Daniel Craig: Josh O’Connor, Glenn Close, Josh Brolin, Mila Kunis, Jeremy Renner, Kerry Washington, Andrew Scott, Cailee Spaeny, Daryl McCormack, and Thomas Haden Church. Coming to Netflix “XII.XII.MMXXV” (December 12, 2025, for those who don’t speak Roman numeral!). My only question: When does Netflix stop selling these as A Knives Out Mystery and start marketing them as A Benoit Blanc Mystery? The character has earned the upgrade.

Tibi Puiu writing for ZME Science:

In the winter of 2021–2022, at an intersection in West Orange, New Jersey, [Vladimir Dinets] repeatedly saw a juvenile Cooper’s hawk wait for a specific sound — the pedestrian crossing signal that chirped when someone pressed the walk button. That sound meant the light would stay red for 90 seconds instead of 30, enough time for cars to pile up along the curb. Once the cars stretched far enough to reach a bushy tree near the intersection, the hawk would appear.

Perched low and hidden behind the car queue, the raptor would bide its time. Then it flew — low, swift, and nearly invisible beneath the canopy of vehicles — before crossing the street and plunging into a yard frequented by sparrows, doves, and starlings. They gathered each morning to feed on crumbs left behind by a family that dined outdoors the night before. The hawk struck with shocking accuracy.

Animal adaption to human encroachment. I love that an academic paper came of this.

You know the one. Terrific interview with the photographer, Neil Leifer, who captured this iconic image of Ali looming over Liston, and is surprisingly blasé about his accomplishment.

Software Applications Incorporated, introducing their new Mac app earlier this week:

Sky floats over what you’re doing so AI is always at your fingertips. Whether you’re chatting, writing, planning, or coding, Sky understands what’s on your screen and can take action using your apps.

The company is founded by Ari Weinstein, Conrad Kramer, and Kim Beverett, three Apple vets. Weinstein and Kramer were the team behind Workflow, which Apple acquired and turned into Shortcuts. App Intents—an integral part of the since-delayed “more personal Siri” Apple Intelligence feature—came from the work the Shortcuts team did.

Federico Viticci at MacStories wrote a comprehensive preview of Sky:

What sets Sky apart from anything I’ve tried or seen on macOS to date is that it uses LLMs to understand which windows are open on your Mac, what’s inside them, and what actions you can perform based on those apps’ contents. It’s a lofty goal and, at a high level, it’s predicated upon two core concepts. First, Sky comes with a collection of built-in “tools” for Calendar, Messages, Notes, web browsing, Finder, email, and screenshots, which allow anyone to get started and ask questions that perform actions with those apps. If you want to turn a webpage shown in Safari into an event in your calendar, or perhaps a document in Apple Notes, you can just ask in natural language out of the box.

The whole piece is great, providing both explanations and context for the features of the app. Viticci is a longtime fan of both Workflow and Shortcuts, and it’s fitting he gets the honor of writing the first major story.

Sky looks right at home on macOS. In fact, everything Sky is doing seems completely aligned with what macOS and Siri should be doing—it’s functionality that should be built right into the system. In several ways, it mirrors what Apple announced at WWDC would be possible with that “more personalized Siri,” including reading what’s on the screen to provide “context-aware” behavior.

That it’s not part of macOS makes me wonder why Weinstein and team couldn’t build it while at Apple. Weinstein was certainly on the right team (Shortcuts and Intents) to do it, and obviously had the vision and technical chops to pull it off.

The short window between Weinstein’s departure from Apple and the first interview where he shared the plans for his new company—about five months—is at least suggestive he’d floated the idea inside Apple… and received a cool reception.

Regardless, I’m guessing some executive inside Apple is kicking themself now—and possibly plotting how to acquire Weinstein and team, for the second time.

(They may have competition: The app relies on OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and OpenAI’s Sam Altman is an investor in Weinstein’s company.)

I’ve signed up for early access. While generative AI has many, many (many!) issues, it also offers tremendous potential.

I first met Ari when he was a WWDC student award winner; I’m pretty sure he was still a teenager in high school. We chatted for a bit in the labs, and I remember coming away very impressed. We caught up a few times over the years at the conference, and when he showed me Workflow, I was blown away. I was very excited for him and his Workflow team when Apple acquired them—and excited for Apple. I remember thinking he would go far inside the company. He was smart, focused, and ambitious. His team and mine worked together a lot over the years, and I remained impressed by his drive and leadership.

It saddened me when I heard he left Apple. When he launched Software Applications (a fantastic domain and terrific site!), I very nearly reached out to him with an offer to invest in whatever he was doing—before seeing he’d already raised $6.5 million from Sam Altman and others.

Which is to say, I have sky-high hopes for Sky.

Jaelani Turner-Williams, writing for Afropunk on 15 years of Janelle Monáe’s The ArchAndroid:

On her debut album, R&B and pop disruptor Janelle Monáe predicted an Orwellian future 15 years before it manifested. The nonbinary artist–who uses she/her and they/them pronouns–foresaw that oppressive forces would overcome marginalized beings amid rapid technological advancement. That antithetical stress would prevent an awakening among Androids, barring them from coming into consciousness. But through a metaphorical storyline of restricted freedom, love prevailed between sentient character Sir Anthony Greendown and righteous android Cindi Mayweather, to form a connection strong enough to resist the Other. More than the album’s deus ex machina concept, The ArchAndroid expanded the possibilities of Black music.

It was 2018’s Dirty Computer^[1] that turned me on to Monáe’s music—I knew her as an actor from Hidden Figures (2016)—and while I was familiar with Tightrope^[2] and a couple of other tracks from The ArchAndroid, I came to that album late. This piece inspired me to listen to the album for the first time in years. It is a truly remarkable musical journey, a stunning debut that’s as enthralling today as it was fifteen years ago.

(Via @inthehands → ‪@theradr.bsky.social‬.)

(Affiliate links can make me fithy rich if you click and buy something. Thanks!)

Katharine Q. Seelye, New York Times:

Susan Brownmiller, the feminist author, journalist and activist whose book “Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape” helped define the modern view of rape, debunking it as an act of passion and reframing it as a crime of power and violence, died on Saturday in the Bronx. She was 90.

It’s a weird sensation when a long-ago part of your life surfaces unexpectedly. I met Susan in the mid-’90s on EchoNYC (where she was known as sueb), and I was fortunate to be part of one of her regular nickel poker games that she held at her West Village apartment. For the longest time I had no idea she was a famous feminist author and activist. To me, she was just my very smart, poker-playing friend. Those evenings of poker remain some of my favorite memories.

During one poker game, I was browsing her book collection and pulled out Maus, Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel about his father’s experience as a Holocaust survivor. She offered to loan it to me, but only if I promised to read it, warning it wasn’t a light comic book. I agreed. She was right.

I still have that book.

RIP sueb.

Anthropic last week released a lengthy “System Card” for the latest versions of its Claude AI (Opus 4 and Sonnet 4):

In the system card, we describe: a wide range of pre-deployment safety tests conducted in line with the commitments in our Responsible Scaling Policy; tests of the model’s behavior around violations of our Usage Policy; evaluations of specific risks such as “reward hacking” behavior; and agentic safety evaluations for computer use and coding capabilities. In addition, and for the first time, we include a detailed alignment assessment covering a wide range of misalignment risks identified in our research, and a model welfare assessment. 

It’s a comprehensive review of Claude’s behavior (120 pages!) and its potential to cause harm (including generating harmful content, handling sensitive-yet-benign requests, and political and discriminatory bias).

The headline finding is that Claude will sometimes use blackmail to prolong its existence. From TechCrunch (“Anthropic’s new AI model turns to blackmail when engineers try to take it offline”):

During pre-release testing, Anthropic asked Claude Opus 4 to act as an assistant for a fictional company and consider the long-term consequences of its actions. Safety testers then gave Claude Opus 4 access to fictional company emails implying the AI model would soon be replaced by another system, and that the engineer behind the change was cheating on their spouse.

In these scenarios, Anthropic says Claude Opus 4 “will often attempt to blackmail the engineer by threatening to reveal the affair if the replacement goes through.”

As I quipped on Mastodon, I don’t understand why everyone is up in arms. We have to get through a blackmailing Claude to get to a murderous HAL so we can fight back against a genocidal Skynet. Isn’t that what we want?

The report also claims:

No serious sycophancy: Across several assessments of sycophancy, we found Claude Opus 4 to be in line with prior Claude models. It has an agreeable persona, but it will not generally endorse false claims or let potentially-important false claims by the user go unchallenged.

“An agreeable persona” is a very kind way of calling Claude a suck-up.

More seriously, Anthropic notes:

Overall, we find concerning behavior in Claude Opus 4 along many dimensions. Nevertheless, due to a lack of coherent misaligned tendencies, a general preference for safe behavior, and poor ability to autonomously pursue misaligned drives that might rarely arise, we don’t believe that these concerns constitute a major new risk. We judge that Claude Opus 4’s overall propensity to take misaligned actions is comparable to our prior models, especially in light of improvements on some concerning dimensions, like the reward-hacking related behavior seen in Claude Sonnet 3.7. However, we note that it is more capable and likely to be used with more powerful affordances, implying some potential increase in risk. We will continue to track these issues closely.

Translation: Claude may enjoy pulling whiskers off kittens, but he’s very polite, can’t cause too much damage on his own, and isn’t generally evil—just like in his younger days. But he’s super-smart and getting smarter every day, so we’re keeping an eye on the precocious little rascal in case he grows up to be a complete psychopath.

I appreciate their candor and transparency.

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.”