Yesterday I wrote:

Everyone’s hair is on fire because a president pardoned his son. Unprecedented? Sure.

Early this morning, I came across an Esquire article from Charles P. Pierce in Apple News+, headlined:

A President Shouldn’t Pardon His Son? Hello, Anybody Remember Neil Bush?

The deck was as straightforward:

Nobody defines Poppy Bush’s presidency by the fact that he pardoned his progeny. The moral: Shut the fck up about Hunter Biden, please.

The article included the following paragraph (emphasis added):

But the luckiest thing about this lucky American businessman is that his father and brother were both presidents of the United States, and that his father exercised his unlimited constitutional power of clemency to pardon The Lucky American Businessman for all that S&L business way back when. The president’s name was George H.W. Bush. The Lucky American Businessman was his son, Neil, whose brother, George, later became president of the United States himself.

I bookmarked it, prepared to post an update to my “unprecedented” comment, but in tracking down the direct web link, I instead got a “Sorry, this story isn’t available in Apple News” error.

Hm. The article was still available in Apple News+ when visited it directly, but both the headline and the deck were now changed. It now read:

Hunter Biden Isn’t the First Presidential Son Caught Up in Controversy. Anybody Remember Neil Bush?

Nobody defines Poppy Bush’s presidency by his son’s struggles or the pardons he issued on his way out of the White House. The moral: Shut the fck up about Hunter Biden, please.

It includes an Editor’s Note:

Editor’s Note: This story has been updated. An earlier version stated incorrectly that George H. W. Bush gave a presidential pardon to his son, Neil Bush. Esquire regrets the error.

The paragraph I quoted also removed the reference to a pardon:

But the luckiest thing about this lucky American businessman is that his father and brother were both presidents of the United States. The president’s name was George H.W. Bush. The Lucky American Businessman was his son, Neil, whose brother, George, later became president of the United States himself.

On the Esquire Politics site simply pulled the article, giving it a title “This Column Is No Longer Available,” with the content of article itself also replaced by an Editor’s Note.

It appears Pierce, the article’s author, got caught spreading misinformation, possibly originating on Threads (archive). The Threads post itself now has a Community note linking to a fact-check.

I wanted to believe that H.W. Bush had pardoned his son—and no one has thought about it since—because I also believe Hunter Biden’s pardon would have absolutely zero impact on President Biden’s legacy.

I’m not sure if Pierce wrote the story based on the misinformation, or added the “pardon” bits to an existing story.

Either way, it’s a reminder of the importance of double-checking what you read, especially when it validates your own viewpoint.

President Joe Biden, in a direct and unapologetic statement:

Today, I signed a pardon for my son Hunter. From the day I took office, I said I would not interfere with the Justice Department’s decision-making, and I kept my word even as I have watched my son being selectively, and unfairly, prosecuted.

When the news broke Sunday evening that President Biden pardoned his son, Hunter, my first thought was good for him. I also knew I’d awake to a string of pearl clutching.

Sure enough, the deluge of denunciations came fast and furious. Almost every story led with the “reversal” of President Biden’s “previous pledges” to not pardon his son, with the “hypocrisy” of his decision “sparking backlash.” Republicans called him a “liar”, Democrats were “disappointed.”

I can’t get into President Biden’s head, but I think that once Trump won, a pardon was a fait accompli. I’m sure the prosecutors knew that, too, at least at some level. There was no way he’d let his son twist in the wind ahead of a vindictive incoming president who nominated Matt Gaetz/Pam Bondi as Attorney General and Kash Patel to lead the FBI. He may have “broken” his promise, but I believe that promise was made under very different circumstances, before the American public elected a criminal. At this point, I think there’s a bit of “fuck it” happening, and I’m OK with that.

I’m only surprised that he did it now, and not at 11:59 a.m. on January 20, 2025, as a massive, Dark Brandon middle finger to the incoming administration.

If Donald Trump’s children were facing jail time, is there any doubt in your mind that he would immediately use his one incontrovertible power as president and pardon them? Heck, I suspect he might do it preemptively as soon as he’s sworn in, just in case.

May I remind you that Donald Trump pardoned his daughter’s father-in-law four years ago, and then, last week, nominated him as ambassador to France?

Beyond that, Trump has a litany of self-serving pardons. I don’t recall the Right raising a ruckus about it four years ago.

Everyone’s hair is on fire because a president pardoned his son. Unprecedented? Sure. But only because the president’s son was prosecuted for a crime few other people would be charged with. As Biden notes in his statement:

Without aggravating factors like use in a crime, multiple purchases, or buying a weapon as a straw purchaser, people are almost never brought to trial on felony charges solely for how they filled out a gun form.

From that previously linked list of Trump pardons and commutations:

The rapper Kodak Black […] was granted a commutation. In 2019, he was sentenced to nearly four years in prison for lying on background paperwork while attempting to buy guns.

Sounds familiar. Except:

[Black] admitted to lying on background check forms while buying multiple firearms […].

Prosecutors said two of the guns were later found by the police at crime scenes, including one — with Black’s fingerprints and a live round in the chamber — that had been used to fire at a “rival rap artist.” […]

Another weapon was discovered in the trunk of a car as the rapper and his team attempted to cross the Canadian border into upstate New York in April. Black was charged with unlawful possession of marijuana and criminal possession of a firearm.

The underlying crimes are superficially similar. If Trump can commute a stranger’s sentence in this situation, why shouldn’t President Biden pardon his son for a less serious version of the same basic crime?

Unsurprisingly, the New York Times has the pearl-clutchiest of takes. Under the hed “Broad Pardon for Hunter Biden Troubles Experts,” writer Kenneth P. Vogel suggests the pardon

[…] is raising awkward historical comparisons and sharp questions about the use of presidential clemency.

Vogel then quotes one of those experts:

“It is extraordinarily hazardous to use the pardon power in a case where the person is an intimate of the president,” said Aziz Z. Huq, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School.

It’s unclear why the good professor believes this, providing no evidence to support his belief, only that:

[…] President Biden’s pardon of his son “really does strike at the rule of law.”

Except it doesn’t. The president has the absolute authority to issue pardons, which Vogel himself immediately notes:

Presidents have unchecked authority to issue pardons, which wipe out convictions, and commutations, which reduce prison sentences.

We may not like how some have used that authority, but it is very much within “the rule of law.”

I’m not big on bothsidesism, but in a world where the president-elect is a convicted felon and adjudicated rapist, who was granted “presidential immunity” by a stolen Supreme Court, and who successfully ran out the clock on his own prosecutions, I’m perfectly comfortable with President Biden exercising his power as a president, and as a father.

The hypocrisy of the Right and everyone else handwringing over this is staggeringly vomitous. Their side has—and will do—much, much worse.

Now, I’d like for President Biden to take it a million steps farther, and offer preemptive pardons and commutations to everyone incarcerated for minor drug offenses, sitting in jails pending bail, and all the people the president-elect has suggested will be targeted by his incoming “Justice” Department. To quote Keith Olbermann:

Literally offer a pardon to anybody Trump might go after for prosecuting him, criticizing him, covering him, or looking at him funny. I want a 1-800-PARDONME hotline. I want 10 million pardons.

After all, if the President’s decision to pardon his son will, says the reliably execrable Jonathan Turley,

be a decision that lives in infamy in presidential politics.

he might as well go all the way. He’s got nothing to lose.

I’m visiting my mom, sitting on my bed with my Vision Pro, legs stretched out in front of me while scrolling through immersive images, and marveling at how good 2D-converted-to-3D photos look. The room has a door to the left and a blank wall to the right.

I’m flipping through images, and suddenly I’m in the bedroom at my home, 2,500 miles away. There was the bedroom door to the left, slightly ajar. The bathroom door to my right, light shining through. Air purifier on the floor. For the briefest of moments, nothing felt odd. I was on my bed at home. I’ve seen this view through my Vision Pro dozens of times.

Then my brain flipped out as it realized I wasn’t looking at reality. The bathroom door wasn’t there. The glowing blue light of the air purifier wasn’t there.

The photo aligned perfectly with the room I’m in: a door where a door was; the bathroom door to the right filling in the blank wall, and the bed, stretched out before me.

I stared at the photo for several seconds trying to figure out what was actually real and what wasn’t. Even though I knew where I was and what I was looking at, I had to lift the Vision Pro to confirm my surroundings.

It was surreal.

The Vision Pro has several issues. It’s expensive. It’s heavy. It stresses my eyes. There aren’t enough compelling apps and content yet.

But goodness, it absolutely nails that tangible sense of being there.

It’s not without some mild reservation that I note the 18th anniversary of the release of the Nintendo Wii. One of my favorite gaming systems is now an adult.

The Wii hit the shelves on November 19, 2006, and quickly became the biggest holiday gift. Waiting lists—and the lines of people wanting to buy—stretched long. People who were lucky enough to reach the front of those lines would sometimes buy two or three and sell them at absurd markups.

In honor of Wii’s birthday, let me tell you the story of how my good friend Torrey Walker (aka THW) made my Christmas that year.

I first wrote about this as it happened in my now-defunct personal blog. Here those entries (lightly edited for length and clarity).

It started just a few weeks after the release, just as the frenzy was reaching fever pitch.…

December 05, 2006: Don’t Buy A Wii

I must implore you: Don’t buy a Nintendo Wii.

As you’ve no doubt heard, both Sony and Nintendo have new gaming systems this gift-giving holiday season, Sony with its sequentially named Playstation 3, and Nintendo with its oddly named Wii.

When I younger, and more dexterous, I loved playing video games. I owned a Playstation and SuperNES; I now own a PS2 and Nintendo GameCube. But I don’t play anywhere near as much as I used to, so the thought of buying a new video gaming system didn’t catch my fancy. Especially one that costs $600 (PS3) or was a minor advance graphically (Wii).

My friend Torrey, though, is an avid gamer, to the point where he stood in line to buy a Wii. Me being the curious sort, and him being the generous type, he brought his Wii over to share with [my then-girlfriend] Ying and my friend Elliot.

We played with Wii for several hours, and it was an absolute blast; from the clean and minimalist Apple-like design, to the Wii-mote (the wireless Wii remote controller), to the surprising physicality of the Wii Sports games.

Ah, the games. Wii comes bundled with a sports pack: Bowling, Tennis, Boxing, Golf and Baseball. You use the Wii-motes as you would use the appropriate sports implement: with Bowling, you pull your arm back and roll it forward as if you were releasing a bowling ball; with Tennis, you swing as if you had a racquet; with Boxing, you hold them in your fists and punch; etc.

Of course, these are video games, and you would expect that you’d be sitting on your couch, waving these Wii-motes around and jamming buttons, but no: we found ourselves getting into the physical motions of playing the games. We’d swing the Wii-mote like we really had a tennis racquet in our hands, even though a sharp wrist flick would be enough. Or we’d deliver huge roundhouse punches in Boxing, even though fast jabs would get the job done.

Both Elliot and Ying were especially interesting to watch. Elliot really got into Tennis; he was leaping back and forth across the floor, reaching for the balls as they whizzed past him. Ying took Boxing to heart, punching and jabbing like her life depended on it, and working up a sweat.

In fact, that would be the hallmark of the Wii afternoon: by the end of the day, all four of us had gotten some amount of physical activity we would not have gotten if we were playing any other video game. That’s right, a workout. Elliot, Ying and I all “boxed” for 15 or 20 minutes, and by the end of it, not only had we started sweating, we actually felt pain in our shoulders and arms!

From a video game!

By the time Torrey was re-boxing the Wii, I was already considering buying a new video game system. I concluded my initial review:

So again, I must beg of you: don’t buy a Wii. If this post tempted you, resist. If you find yourself in a Toys ‘R’ Us or Wal-Mart, and you see that gleaming white rectangle sitting on the shelf, you don’t want it.

But do me a favor will you? Hold on to it and give me a call, OK?

Two weeks later, things escalated.

December 17, 2006: A Wii Bit of Madness

It’s 5:30 on a Sunday morning, and I’m about to go stand in line for a Nintendo Wii. What am I, crazy?

Indeed, I was clearly suffering from Wii-thdrawal after playing with the system but not having one of my own, so I figured I had to at least try to get a Wii. It didn’t go as I’d hoped.

[Ying and I] have returned from our Wii excursion, and other than memories of long lines and cold people, we are empty-handed. We visited ten locations (which includes repeat visits to one), and each store had a line longer than we could have imagined.

Waking up at 5:30 am was, it turns out, an amateur move.

We happened to be [at Westgate Mall Target] last night about 8pm, and three families had already lined up (one at 6pm) for an 8am store opening. When we returned this morning, about 7am, the line was over 100 people, for a store claiming 100 units.

Had we decided to stand in line at 8pm the night earlier, we would have come home with a Wii. Ah, Wii-grets.

Ying is a little disappointed by the lack of Wii; she’s second-guessing her decisions to wake up at 5:30, to go to certain stores in a certain order, etc. For me, it was more of an experiment. It was interesting to see which stores had longer lines, and how many people were willing to brave the cold (37 degrees, by my car’s gauge) for a game system.

I’m willing to wait until the excitement subsides a bit.

Yep, I’d pretty much Wii-signed myself to not owning a Wii for weeks, possibly months, and I was OK with that.

Then Torrey Did A Thing.

December 20, 2006: THW comes through, Wii is in the hizz-ouse!

In 1984, my mom woke me up early Christmas morning. Sitting next to my bed was the unopened box of an Apple //c computer and monitor. My uncle owned one of those, and I’d spent time at his house hacking with it. He’d once promised he’d bring it over to my house so I could have more time with it. Even in my sleepy state, when I saw the box, my initial shot of excitement was quickly replaced with cold logic: “What’s my uncle’s computer doing here?”

I was told nope, it’s not your uncle’s, it’s yours, and it’s your Christmas gift.

I believe the ceiling still has an imprint of my head, and the floor a dent from my jaw [from] the extremely unexpected present.

Today, THW sent me an email.In today? What time can I stop by to say hi? I’m leaving... tomorrow and won’t be back until just before New Years. /thw

Stop on by, I told him. I figured we’d BS for a few minutes, catch up on what’s been going on the last couple of days, chat about plans for the holiday break we’re about to start. You know, typical friend stuff before you don’t see each other for two weeks or so.

In he walks. We chat about two minutes before he steps back outside my office, and I hear some rustling of plastic. He steps back in and hands me a white box with “Wii” written on it in huge letters.

Let me go through my thought process here.

On seeing it: Fucker! You got a me a gift and put it in a Wii box? That’s cold.

On holding it: It’s heavy.... Oh! You’re loaning me your Wii for the week you’ll be away. That’s fucking sweet. What a good friend.

I thanked him for loaning it to me, and he says, nope, that’s yours. That’s your Christmas gift.

I couldn’t quite get my mind around it. You’re giving me your Wii?

“No”, he says (silently adding “you idiot”, I imagine), “it’s yours.”

Through a series of circumstances, he had an extra one. When he read my entry about waking up at 5:30 to stand in line, and coming back empty-handed, he made his decision: as his Christmas gift to me, he would sell me his extra Wii. I guess he decided that getting up that early to buy one was a worthy endeavor, and instead of making beaucoup bucks scalping it on eBay (as he rightly could), he decided to sell it to me.

Wow.

Last Saturday, when Ying and I had decided to wake up early the next day, I called Elliot, and offered him the chance to buy a Wii, should we find ourselves lucky enough to find two. He declined, but was touched that I would give up a potential financial benefit for him. I didn’t quite understand it at the time. He’s my friend, and of course if I’m buying a Wii I’ll pick up a second one for him.[…]

Now, I get it. What Torrey did was a selfless act. Not in the same realm of giving up a kidney or the last taco, but still remarkable. He passed up the chance to make money so his friend could have a Wii-filled vacation. I was actually tearing up a bit when he [handed] it to me.

Unsurprisingly, I still have that Wii, and it was a source of joy for . While I haven’t played it in a long while, it—and the hours and hours of fun it generated over the years—remains a treasured touchtone of my friendship with Torrey.

Thank you Torrey for that unforgettable act of friendship, and Happy Birthday Wii!

It’s an odd feeling to be—in even a small way—celebrating seven years as an American citizen, just days after American democracy gave us, for the second time, a Donald Trump presidency.

Yet it is also fitting, as the reason I became an American citizen seven years ago was because American democracy gave us, for the first time, a Donald Trump presidency.

In 2016, despite living in America for thirty-five years, I wasn’t ever motivated to pursue my citizenship. There was no real reason, merely inertia. Lack of citizenship never stopped me from doing anything: As a permanent resident I could work legally, had most of the protections of being a citizen, and while I wasn’t always thrilled with the people America elected (hello Reagan, Bush, and Bush), the impact on my daily life was minimal.

In my Member Update #2, I wrote:

For my first decade or so in the U.S., I didn't care much for politics, and didn't really identify with a political party.

I only really started paying attention to politics during the Clinton administration. Because politics wasn’t huge in my life, neither was voting. I came close to applying for citizenship as I tracked Barack Obama’s rise—from a junior senator speaking at the DNC, through his historic nomination, election, and reelection—but the inertia was powerful. I deeply regret missing the opportunity to vote for him, or to be naturalized under his presidency.

After eight years of Barack Obama, I was excited by the possibility of following our first Black president with our first female president, but my first hint this wasn’t the timeline I thought it was came on February 16, 2016. I wrote in Day One:

Tonight, I fear for America.

Donald Trump won the Republican New Hampshire primary. […]

Trump would be an unmitigated disaster, and it’s going to ensure that I have my citizenship, so I can leave the country for more than six months at a time....

I wonder if there’s any chance of my getting it in time to vote?

It wouldn’t have been enough time, but it didn’t matter: I didn’t start the process.

Then this, on March 8:

It’s Time.

Trump has won Michigan and Mississippi. He won Michigan with over 37%; his nearest competitor is Kasich with 25% and Cruz with about 24%. He won Mississippi with 49%, with Cruz at 35%. This terrifies me. Trump has a legitimate shot at the nomination, and the presidency.

I included a link to 10 Steps to Naturalization, Understanding the Process of Becoming a U.S. Citizen.

I’d finally started the process, but there was no real urgency. I had faith in the American democratic system, and, like many people then (and many people this year) I was certain beyond any doubt Trump could not possibly win. I could wait, and would get to be naturalized under America’s first female president.

Yeah.

January 19, 2017:

Awake in a Marriott in Annapolis.

The end of Barack Obama’s administration is near and I’m sad and scared.

I never completed my citizenship papers and a small part of me worries it won’t go through.

Also sad that I’d be sworn in under Trump.

Sad indeed, but not enough to allow that distasteful prospect to deter me. His inauguration was the motivation I needed to finally complete the process: I felt it necessary to cloak myself in the protections of American Citizenship.

February 2, 2017:

Just mailed my citizenship application. I’m slightly short of breath.

I had a biometrics appointment a month later, and on August 30 I went in for my in-person interview, where they assessed my English reading and writing ability, along with my knowledge of U.S. history, the Constitution, and current politics.

The interview was a little nerve-racking, mostly because I feared vapor-locking while answering the civics questions, but I got through them with no issues.

At the end, the interviewer handed me my result form, with a big “X” next to “Congratulations! Your application is recommended for approval.” I unexpectedly choked up when he wished me luck, and only barely kept my emotions in check as I rose to leave.

I went home and poured myself the most American of spirits, bourbon—Jefferson’s Reserve, a hat-tip to our founding fathers.

Then, on November 9, 2017:

American Citizen!

So here I am, seven years after Donald Trump’s first inauguration, celebrating my citizenship and my right to vote, just days after millions of other Americans exercised theirs to vote for Donald Trump. Again.

Deja vu is a weird sensation.

It’s just after 4 a.m. on the East Coast as I post this, and I haven’t been able to sleep because it’s now clear that Donald Trump will again be president of the United States.

While it hasn’t yet been officially called by the AP or others, Trump sits at 267 Electoral College votes, with AK and its three electoral votes the only thing standing between him and victory. I suspect by the time the sun breaks over the Atlantic Ocean, Trump will have been declared the winner, with as many as 312 electoral votes.

What has become of this country?

Tens of millions of my supposedly “fellow” Americans consciously chose a demagogue and the vile hatred he and his followers represent. They knew the nastiness he offered, and they wanted it.

I admit that in my heart of hearts I was hoping for a Harris landslide, a blowout victory that repudiated MAGA politics. Instead, Trump has solidified his grasp on this country (when you’re a star, they let you do it).

Don’t ever tell me again this country isn’t deeply racist and misogynistic.

This election was about power: Who has it, who wields it, and who benefits from it.

Americans voted for their own self-interest: To keep themselves at the top of the food chain.

They understand that being a white male makes you untouchable, and being a white female confers the privilege of white men upon you.

A significant number of Latino voters also aligned themselves with Trump, perhaps out of a misguided attempt at self preservation, but equally likely out of an anti-immigrant “fuck you, I got mine” mentality.

I’ve seen a lot of people on Mastodon (and I’m guessing across most social media) saying they’ll fight Trump for the next four years.

Cool cool cool.

What makes them think he’ll allow that fight? Where will they take it? The courts? The press? Congress? The streets?

They have a lot of faith in the strength of institutions he’s pledged to destroy—or which have already capitulated well before his election.

The Supreme Court has granted him immunity. The press already has demonstrated deference. Congress will be a feckless lapdog. And protesters in the streets are likely to be met with a military presence—whether it’s U.S. military or Trump’s “Proud Boys.”

After what we’ve observed over the last decade+, and especially what Trump and his MAGA party have done and said they’ll do, what reason is there to believe he won’t shut down any protesters, with intimidation if not violence? We’ve seen it already.

And here’s a truth: Those with the energy to fight are often the ones who can just walk away from that fight without consequence.

The rest of us who can’t “blend in” are tired of having our souls crushed by an America we thought had our backs.

I’ve also seen people trotting out “we are better than this” and “this is not who we are”.

Bullshit.

It’s time to retire both phrases. We’ve proven we’re not “better than this.” We’ve shown this is “who we are.”

It’s been true for a long while, but there was always some amount of plausible deniability. It’s pretty damn hard to deny it now after this electoral outcome.

On January 20, 2025, Donald Trump gets sworn in for the second time. On that day, I expect The Great American Experiment will come to an end.

Seventy-five days.

It feels impossible to overstate the importance of this election. “The fate of our democracy hangs in the balance” seems somehow both overwrought and woefully insufficient. Yet that seems to be the stakes at play. We are choosing between Kamala Harris, who supports democracy; and Donald Trump, who has repeatedly expressed disdain for it.

An election between these two candidates—one, a prosecutor, Senator, and the sitting Vice President; the other a convicted criminal, adjudicated sexual assaulter, and twice-impeached former president—should be a cakewalk. That it’s a coin flip is terrifying, and for the next few days we’ll all be bundles of raw, vibrating nerves as we await the results.

While we’re unlikely to have a definitive winner tonight, I’m hoping we have a clear trend: that undecideds break for Harris, Democrats turn out in huge numbers for her, and Republicans, tired of the circus, vote for a president they can oppose without fear of retribution.

As I write this approaching 11 p.m. EST on election night, it’s not clear that America will repudiate Trump for a second time in two elections; in several places he’s doing better this year than he did last. It’s obviously still early, and there’s a lot of vote counting still to be done, but Trump’s continued (and growing) strength with a certain portion of the electorate is deeply concerning. The trends don’t seem to be trending toward Harris.

Keith Olbermann noted on a recent episode of The Countdown that

[…] there are people voting for Donald Trump today that were nine when he began his first campaign. They don’t know an America without a subculture of boastful stupidity and conspiracy.[…] They only know this shit.

Those 18 year olds have known only the divisiveness and anti-democratic rhetoric of Trump and MAGA Republicans. Many have grown up believing Trump is a “normal” politician, that his and MAGA policies are mainstream, and that democracy is about demonizing the other side.

That mindset may carry the day.

Like many of you, I’ll be glued to my screens tonight, in both anticipation and fear.

I started my evening feeling nervous but optimistic. Right now, as I write this, that optimism is starting to wane. The evening has shades of 2016, and that scares me beyond measure.

Apple had a busy week of product announcements, in an unusual format. Instead of an in-person event, or a single keynote-style video presentation, three classes of products were announced over three days via press release and 10-15 minute videos.

Monday: iMac (video):

Apple today announced the new iMac, featuring the powerful M4 chip and Apple Intelligence, in its stunning, ultra-thin design.

The new iMac now offers a $200 nano-texture option for the display; I have it on my M4 iPad Pro and it’s fantastic for eliminating reflections and glare. As with the iPad Pro, though, it’s not an option on the entry-level configuration, so you’ll also pay at least another $200 just to unlock the nano-texture, technically making it a $400 upgrade, assuming you weren’t already in the market for the extra CPU power, gigabit ethernet, and four total Thunderbolt 4 ports.

The new colors are very pretty (if muted); great for those who, unlike me, want a pop of color in their computer. As before, the mouse/trackpad/keyboard accessories are color-matched, and now sport USB-C instead of lightning (finally!), although the mouse still charges from the bottom—a location I’ve never understood. I did appreciate John Gruber’s recent defense of its placement, though.

The iMac can also drive two 6K external displays alongside the built-in 24” display, which makes for a phenomenal battlestation. If I was an all-in-one person (rather than a laptop-and-monitor person), this would be a great system.

Tuesday: Mac mini (video):

Apple today unveiled the all-new Mac mini powered by the M4 and new M4 Pro chips, and redesigned around Apple silicon to pack an incredible amount of performance into an even smaller form of just 5 by 5 inches. […]

For more convenient connectivity, it features front and back ports, and for the first time includes Thunderbolt 5 for faster data transfer speeds on the M4 Pro model.

The big story here is that the new Mac mini is mini-er: Less than half the desk footprint of the previous mini (though a tad taller).

This is a device for which I have zero need yet desperately want to buy, simply for the cool factor. I have a barely used M1 Mac mini that I may have to trade in. The boost in CPU and data transfer might make it a phenomenal Blu-ray ripper and in-home video streamer.

Wednesday: MacBook Pro (video):

[…] the 14-inch MacBook Pro includes the blazing-fast performance of M4 and three Thunderbolt 4 ports […]

The 14- and 16-inch models with M4 Pro and M4 Max offer Thunderbolt 5 for faster transfer speeds and advanced connectivity. All models include a Liquid Retina XDR display that gets even better with an all-new nano-texture display option and up to 1000 nits of brightness for SDR content, an advanced 12MP Center Stage camera, along with up to 24 hours of battery life, the longest ever in a Mac.

I’m a huge fan of the 14” MacBook Pro. The Liquid Retina XDR display on my M2 MacBook Pro is stunning, and as I mentioned above, I love the nano-texture display on my iPad Pro; having it on my laptop would be fantastic. Good news: The $150 nano-texture option is available on the base model MacBook Pro.

Adding Thunderbolt 5, a nano-texture display option, a brighter display, and 24-hour battery life makes this a near-perfect laptop. If I could only have one computer, it would be the 14” MacBook Pro. I find it the perfect combination of portable and powerful.

All it needs is cellular capabilities. (Maybe next year.)

Apple Intelligence

Each press release touted—via the same boilerplate—support for Apple Intelligence:

Apple Intelligence ushers in a new era for the Mac, bringing personal intelligence to the personal computer. Combining powerful generative models with industry-first privacy protections, Apple Intelligence harnesses the power of Apple silicon and the Neural Engine to unlock new ways for users to work, communicate, and express themselves on Mac.

I’m excited to experience Apple Intelligence, though most of the features I’m interested in—primarily those driven by “personal context”—won’t come until (I presume) 2025.

My experience so far with the available Apple Intelligence features has been ho-hum. The notification and email summaries are interesting, though not terribly useful in most instances.

For example, a pair of Amazon notifications, the first telling me a package is 10 stops away, the second saying it was delivered, was summarized as “Package delivered, currently 10 stops away.”

I know Apple Intelligence will improve over time, so I’m not going to ding it just yet, except to say Apple is really pushing it as a reason to buy new hardware, and I think most early purchasers will be disappointed, at least initially.

Remember: Never buy hardware for the promise of what it will do in the future. Buy for what it’s capable of doing today.

M4 Power

The new M4 looks pretty damn powerful, and it wouldn’t surprise me if most people buying one won’t need to upgrade it for many, many years. (I wonder what impact that will have on Apple’s sales in the long-term?)

If you currently have an Intel-based Mac (or PC), even the most entry-level M4 Mac will be a massive upgrade in speed. For some, like a medical student I was speaking with recently who owned a 2017 Intel-based Mac, even a refurbished M1 or M2 Mac would be noticeably faster (not to mention lighter and less noisy) than what they now use.

Apple hardware has never been more powerful and capable, and with such low power and cooling needs. I’m salivating at the possibility of some radically redesigned computers in the near future.

A few days ago—after a brutal Mets loss to the Dodgers—I snarked on Mastodon:

A Dodgers/Yankees matchup would be my worst nightmare.

Zero rooting interest. Turn off the television.

Welp, here we are.

Growing up a New York Mets fan, I’m vehemently anti-Yankees. As a San Francisco resident and Giants fan for the last quarter century, I unconditionally detest the Dodgers.

As storied as Yankees/Dodgers World Series matchups have been historically—11 of them going back to 1941, including Don Larsen’s perfect game in 1956 (still the only one pitched), Sandy Koufax’s 15-strikeout complete game in 1963, and Reggie Jackson’s 3-home runs on three consecutive pitches from three different pitchers in 1977—the idea of supporting either team makes me violently ill.

My rooting rules are uncomplicated ^[1] :

• Mets and Giants over anyone
• Eastern/Western Divisions over the others
• National League over American League
• Anyone over Yankees/Dodgers

Yes, that sometimes meant rooting for a Central Division or American League team if they were up against the Yankees or Dodgers, but it was always worth it. Nothing was more important than those two teams losing.

But facing each other? Sometimes the rules, much like Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, result in an untenable situation which, if left unresolved, may end with a catastrophic core meltdown.

So my solution is easy: Don’t watch the games.

I’m probably not the only one.

Sure, some won’t watch because this is a “coastal elites” match up of Evil New York against Hollywood Los Angeles, both with their big money, big name players—the middle of the country naturally roots against both as easily as I do—there’s a bigger reason this Series is likely to be ignored by the masses.

Keith Olbermann explains on his mosty-politics-but-somtimes-sports Countdown podcast:

The famous Yankees and Dodgers are actually two of the most disastrously underperforming franchises in sports. If you consider the year 2000 as the last year of the 20th century, the Yankees have won one World Series in this century. Even if you don’t, they’ve won one World Series since 2000. The Dodgers have won one World Series in a full season since 1965.

Nobody cares about these teams because they’ve basically sucked for a generation. On top of that, baseball itself has changed—for the worse—since the turn of the century^[2].

Olbermann again:

The long regular season and the quick playoffs were designed to establish which team was best that year. You played and you played and you played from Spring to Summer into Fall and you beat everybody in your league. And then you faced the team that had played and beaten everybody in their league.

And the result was a Series that was always novel and fresh and exciting and faced pitchers against hitters they’d never seen before.

Today, with Interleague play, “balanced” schedules, the extended Wild Card playoffs, and the National League adoption of the Designated Hitter rule (barf), the regular season is boring, the playoffs are boring, and—because the World Series teams already faced each other during the regular season, as the Yankees and Dodgers did in June—the World Series matchups end up being... boring.

Olbermann, once again:

It is believed about 60 million people watched game 7 of the 1986 World Series^[3] on television.

If 60 million people watch the entirety of this World Series on television, if that’s the total audience for seven games, they will hold two parades afterward: One for the winning team and one for all the TV and advertising executives.

And by the away, if they get sixty million total audience on TV, the ad executives and the TV executives will get drunker than the winning players do.

And his coup de grâce:

We’re just amazed that the two best teams on paper are actually in the World Series, and how did they get there? They beat the wildcard teams.

Winning against the fourth place team. Congrats?

When I linked to a study showing police stop Black drivers more often than speed cameras, I wrote:

There’s no denying DWB is real; I’ve experienced it myself multiple times.

Here’s one example. I originally wrote this in June 2008 for my now-defunct personal blog. I’ve updated temporal references appropriately, and lightly edited for clarity.

In late 2005, my buddy Ron and I and several other coworkers volunteered for Habitat for Humanity. Ron had asked our company to sponsor an event for the Black employees association, which included buying several boxes of pizza for the volunteers. By the end of the day, there were a lot of half-empty boxes no one wanted, so Ron decided to take them home.

We plopped into my Nissan Altima for the drive back to his place in Mountain View; me, with my baseball cap turned backwards; Ron, many boxes of pizza on his lap; both of us shabby from building houses. As we’re approaching our exit on the freeway, we notice a cop car trailing us. My immediate comment to Ron was “I bet you he exits with us” and, sure enough, he does.

But then, he passes us on the left and pulls a couple of cars ahead of us. As we wait for a light to change, I think, hey, it was just a coincidence, no ulterior motives.

We turn onto Ron’s block and park. Ron gets out, and I notice there are flashing lights behind us. Ron looks back, his hands filled with pizza boxes, and asks, somewhat incredulously, “Did he just pull us over?”

Yep. He sure did. He’d apparently waited until we turned, then flipped on his lights and followed us.

The cop gets out of his car, strolls over to us and asks for my license and registration, which I dutifully hand over. A well-trained question crosses my lips.

“What seems to be the problem, officer?”

His answer will go down in the annals of justification history: “I noticed your front license plate was missing.”

I glance over at Ron, then back to the cop.

“I know,” I say evenly. “Is that a problem?”

“There are people who steal the front license plates from cars, and put them onto similar vehicles. If you do a plate check, it seems to match.”

“So,” I ask coolly, “you wanted to warn me that my front plate was missing, in case it had been stolen and used on another, stolen, car?”

“That’s correct.”

I took a breath.

“Well, I only have the one,” I fibbed with a small smile, knowing full well the second one was on the back—and had been for some three years.

“Sometimes they come stuck together from the DMV, and you end up with both on the back.”

“Oh. I didn’t know that,” I responded with faux concern. “I’ll have to check that when I get home!”

At some point during this conversation, I’d gotten out the car so the cop could show me the missing plate I already knew was missing, and was standing with Ron, both of us rolling our eyes at each other in disbelief. 

I eventually thanked the officer for his concern and assured him that my front license plate hadn’t been stolen (since one had never been placed there), and that I’d be sure to check my rear plate for a second one stuck to the first.

I also felt compelled to slip in during the conversation, in my best “I’m an educated black man: Your worst nightmare” voice, that we both worked for Apple, had just come from volunteering at Habitat for Humanity after having bought a dozen pizzas for the crew, and were taking the rest home. Just to let him know that he wasn’t dealing with a couple of punk-ass kids.

I asked if there’s anything else we can do for him, and bade him farewell, and we watched, shaking our heads, as he returned to his vehicle and pulled away.

Here we were, two intelligent, well-paid, well-spoken Black men in somewhat shabby clothing, pulled over by a cop who’d followed us on the freeway, run our plates and found nothing, but—still suspicious of two disheveled Black men driving a well-maintained car and carrying several boxes of pizza—“found” a reason to “inform” us that our front plate was missing.

Purely as a courtesy, of course.

If only we didn’t have those pizzas.

Maker’s Mark was the first bourbon I fell in love with, and Woodford Reserve may have been the second. Both remain favorites for an “every day” bottle, but I’ve long left them to explore the broader bourbon world.

My whiskey partner Tammy Tan also claims Maker’s Mark as her first bourbon love, so we—along with other members of the West Coast Whiskey Club—were excited to revisit these two beloved brands in some of their more distinctive forms.

• Woodford Reserve:
  • Distiller’s Select (90.4 proof)
  • 2024 Master’s Collection (118.4 proof)
  • 2020 Master’s Collection (123.6 proof)
• Maker’s Mark:
  • 2023 Cellar Aged (119.3 proof)
  • 2024 Heart Release (111.7 proof)
  • Private Selection from Escaya Wine and Spirits (113.4 proof)
  • Cask Strength (109.6 proof)

Both Maker’s Mark and Woodford Reserve have distinctive flavor personalities. Maker’s, being a wheated bourbon (replacing the usual rye in the mash bill), tends to have a sweeter profile, with strong notes of vanilla, buttercream, and ripe fruit coming through. Woodford often has a drier, somewhat spicier profile, with notes of stewed fruit and burnt caramel.

Those broad distinctions showed up in this tasting, resulting in a nearly clean split of the brands in our final ranking.

As before, we tasted blind and discussed the pours together, then ranked them individually. We compared our rankings, and debated adjustments.

With our sometimes similar palates, Tammy and I again aligned on our top picks:

1. Maker’s Mark 2023 Cellar Aged
2. Maker’s Mark Cask Strength
3. Maker’s Mark Private Selection

We weren’t surprised here: We both love Maker’s Mark in general. We found the Cellar Aged to be the most reminiscent of “classic” Maker’s Mark, but with way more depth and complexity. It was simply the most “interesting” yet “classic” bourbon in the collection.

I liked that it was sweet, smoky, and with a prominent but not overpowering alcohol nose. It was a bourbon I wanted to chew on while pondering a cigar.

The Cask Strength was a close second. Immediate baking spices on the nose, with lots of vanilla and fruit, and a bit of tar on the back. The alcoholic burn was more prominent than I’d like, and the finish a bit shorter that ideal, but that just made me want to go in for another sip. It turned out to be rather well balanced.

The Private Selection snuck up on us. On first taste, we found it had a limited nose and palate, and we were close to dismissing it. But after letting it sit for a while, it really opened up, and the vanilla, chewy caramel, and fruit (figs? dates?) really came out in a lovely way that rewarded our patience.

That left our final four:

Placing the Woodford Reserve Distiller’s Select in seventh place was an early, easy call. We both agreed it was a perfectly acceptable bourbon, but which didn’t have nearly enough distinguishing characteristics to make it stand out in this pack.

We struggled with the ordering for 4, 5, and 6. For a while, I had the Woodford Reserve 2020 Master’s Collection in fourth place (in part due to Tammy’s influence!), pushing the rest of my list down, but I kept coming back to the Maker’s Mark 2024 Heart Release because of its classic caramel and brown sugar goodness, plus a little bit of extra heat and woodiness I found interesting, and which Tammy found slightly off-putting. I had to move the Heart Release up.

Likewise, the Woodford Reserve 2024 Master’s Collection had a lovely nose once it opened up, and some soft caramel and perhaps peppermint on the palate, but it had a sharpness to it that I didn’t fully enjoy. I sense this would do well in a Mint Julep.

The Woodford Reserve 2020 Master’s Collection had me intensely debating its position. In the end, I found its heavy alcoholic burn hid too much of the nose and palate. Once that dissipated, I did enjoy its sugar cookie and cream wafer flavors, but I just couldn’t get past that burn, causing me to drop it a couple of positions.

The West Coast Whiskey Club collectively ranked things in a different order: They placed our favorite, the Maker’s Mark 2023 Cellar Aged, at the four spot, and the Maker’s Mark 2024 Heart Release at number one (with a small handful of members ranking it last or near last).

The Cellar Aged especially seemed quite polarizing: It garnered more 1s and 2s than the “winning” Heart Release, but also a lot more 6s and 7s. Sixteen of the 24 tasters gave the Cellar Aged a top-two or bottom-two rank, vs. just 12 for the Heart Release.

(The only more-polarizing entry was the Maker’s Mark Cask Strength, with 17 of 24 ranking it top-two or bottom-two. It ended up in fifth place in the WCWC rankings, and second for us.)

On the flip side, there was broad agreement on the placement of the Woodford Reserve Distiller’s Select; half the tasters rated in the bottom two spots, and it pulled seven last-place votes, more than double anything else. Only two people ranked it as their top two. It was clearly outshone in this competition.

These were all good bourbons, though. I expect most of them would be even more enjoyable outside of a taste test, whether on their own, or in a cocktail. The ranking is definitely not a reflection on their quality. It can be difficult to judge quality from a half-ounce pour, and more difficult still with five or six other whiskeys clamoring for the attention of our nose and taste buds. I’m sure if we did this tasting again tomorrow, we’d end up with a different ranking.

I know, for example, that despite landing in the seventh spot, that I would gladly partake of a Woodford Reserve Distillers Select most any day. I’ve done it many times before; it makes for a wonderful Manhattan, for example.

Taste, as always, is subjective. Personally, I think I’ll seek out a Cellar Aged for my collection.

In “The Internet Archive’s Fight to Save Itself”, Kate Knibbs at Wired writes: 

It is no exaggeration to say that digital archiving as we know it would not exist without the Internet Archive--and that, as the world's knowledge repositories increasingly go online, archiving as we know it would not be as functional. Its most famous project, the Wayback Machine, is a repository of web pages that functions as an unparalleled record of the internet. Zoomed out, the Internet Archive is one of the most important historical-preservation organizations in the world. The Wayback Machine has assumed a default position as a safety valve against digital oblivion. The rhapsodic regard the Internet Archive inspires is earned--without it, the world would lose its best public resource on internet history.

I, too, am rhapsodic about the Internet Archive. I use it regularly to find previous versions of websites, or content not otherwise available. Preserving our digital history is a noble and worthy effort that should be applauded. Sadly, but unsurprisingly, some would prefer to sue them out of existence:

Since 2020, it's been mired in legal battles. In Hachette v. Internet Archive, book publishers complained that the nonprofit infringed on copyright by loaning out digitized versions of physical books. In UMG Recordings v. Internet Archive, music labels have alleged that the Internet Archive infringed on copyright by digitizing recordings.

The book lending was a decade-old program, where they bought (or were donated) a physical copy of a book, scanned it, and loaned it out to a single person at a time, similar to a physical book from a library. It was expanded during the pandemic:

In March 2020, as schools and libraries abruptly shut down, they faced a dilemma. Demand for ebooks far outstripped their ability to loan them out under restrictive licensing deals, and they had no way of lending out books that existed only in physical form. In response, the Internet Archive made a bold decision: It allowed multiple people to check out digital versions of the same book simultaneously. It called this program the National Emergency Library. “We acted at the request of librarians and educators and writers,” says Chris Freeland.

Here’s what the Internet Archive wrote when they announced the National Emergency Library:

To address our unprecedented global and immediate need for access to reading and research materials, as of today, March 24, 2020, the Internet Archive will suspend waitlists for the 1.4 million (and growing) books in our lending library by creating a National Emergency Library to serve the nation’s displaced learners. This suspension will run through June 30, 2020, or the end of the US national emergency, whichever is later. 

During the waitlist suspension, users will be able to borrow books from the National Emergency Library without joining a waitlist, ensuring that students will have access to assigned readings and library materials that the Internet Archive has digitized for the remainder of the US academic calendar, and that people who cannot physically access their local libraries because of closure or self-quarantine can continue to read and thrive during this time of crisis, keeping themselves and others safe.

Students and libraries didn’t have easy access to books during the pandemic, and the Internet Archive tried to help, at no cost to readers. Instead of supporting the effort, or providing access to ebooks themselves, book publishers and authors sued. It’s unclear how much money the book lending cost these publishers and authors; I’m guessing it’s far less than the lawsuit amount. I doubt a significant percentage of those book loans would have been purchases.

The recordings were of records in the “obsolete” 78 rpm format:

In 2023, several major record labels, including Universal Music Group, Sony, and Capitol, sued the Internet Archive over its Great 78 Project, a digital archive of a niche collection of recordings of albums in the obsolete record format known as 78s, which was used from the 1890s to the late 1950s. The complaint alleges that the project "undermines the value of music." It lists 2,749 recordings as infringed, which means damages could potentially be over $400 million.

I’m guessing these record companies weren’t making any money from these 78s, certainly not $400 million worth. I’d bet they haven’t made that much combined since those records were first sold. They’re suing because it’s the only way for them to make money on works that otherwise make them nothing. It’s rent-seeking in the form of copyright infringement lawsuits, a transfer of wealth from a nonprofit to a very-much-for-profit.

As a nonprofit, the Internet Archive is supported by some very large foundations (and individual donations), with reported revenue around $30 million and expenses of nearly $26 million, yet I’d be surprised if that’s sufficient to continue archiving the ever-growing digital world—and to defend itself from lawsuits. The UMG judgement is thirteen times more than the Internet Archive’s revenue, and may be enough to put the Internet Archive out of business.

The BBC’s Chris Stokel-Walker writes about the potential impact of losing our digital history:

38% of web pages that Pew tried to access that existed in 2013 no longer function. But it's also an issue for more recent publications. Some 8% of web pages published at some point 2023 were gone by October that same year.

This isn't just a concern for history buffs and internet obsessives. According to the study, one in five government websites contains at least one broken link. Pew found more than half of Wikipedia articles have a broken link in their references section, meaning the evidence backing up the online encyclopaedia's information is slowly disintegrating.

Stokel-Walker goes on to note that:

[…] thanks to the work of the Internet Archive, not all those dead links are totally inaccessible. For decades, the Archive's Wayback Machine project has sent armies of robots to crawl through the cascading labyrinths of the internet. These systems download functional copies of websites as they change over time – often capturing the same pages multiple times in a single day – and make them available to public free of charge.

“When we then went and looked at how many of those URLs were available in the Wayback Machine, we found that two-thirds of those were available in a way," [Mark Graham, director of the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine] says. In that sense, the Internet Archive is doing what it set out to do – it's saving records of online society for posterity.

Wikipedia gets a lot of attention as the world’s store of knowledge, but many of the “verifiable facts” that support Wikipedia articles are “backed” by the Internet Archive. Does Wikipedia pay anything to the Internet Archive for making their service more trustworthy?

(Worth noting: Wikipedia had 2023 revenue of $180 million and expenses of $168 million, six times that of the Internet Archive.)

Stokel-Walker, again: 

One thing is clear, though, [Mar Hicks, a historian of technology at the University of Virginia] says, we should all pay up to support the fight for preservation. "From a very pragmatic perspective, if you do not pay these people and make sure that these archives are funded, they will not exist into the future, they will break down and then the whole point of collecting them will have gone out the window," says Hicks. "Because the whole point of the archive is not that it just gets collected, but that it persists indefinitely into the future."

If companies don’t want to maintain archives of their content themselves, rather than suing, why not partner with the Internet Archive to handle the archiving?

Just this September, Google and the Internet Archive announced a partnership to allow people to see previous versions of websites surfaced through Google Search by linking to the Wayback Machine. Google previously offered its own cached historical websites; now it leans on a small nonprofit.

It’s unclear how much—if anything—Google is actually paying for this partnership, though. Perhaps they donate, then take a tax deduction, saving themselves potentially millions of dollars while offloading the technical—and legal—burden?

I donate to the Internet Archive (and Wikipedia), but foundational aspects of the internet (see also open source projects) should not rely on the largess of individuals—or even massive foundations—to sustain them.

We also need to address the “single point of failure” nature of the Internet Archive. These recent lawsuits—or future ones—could very well kill the nonprofit, and with it, petabytes of valuable archives.

Perhaps every content company and publisher over a certain valuation should be encouraged (required?) to pay into a fund to ensure their content is archived for posterity, along the lines of FRAND licensing. Or they can maintain archives themselves, as long as they agree to make those archives available to the public in perpetuity.

Or perhaps indemnify the Internet Archive (and other nonprofits with similar goals) from these types of lawsuits. They aren’t selling access to this content, and there are no ads on the site. It’s not a money making venture.

Perhaps such an organization needs to be certified, or adhere to specific behaviors, to be indemnified.

Or perhaps the copyright laws need to be changed to allow for the explicit right to archive content and make it available online in some form.

(I’m not anti-copyright, unlike some critics of these lawsuits. I believe authors and publishers deserve the right to control the use of their content (especially in this AI-driven environment). That fundamental right needs to be balanced with the important goals of preservation and access.)

I’m not sure what the right answer is here, only that we need to preserve our books, movies, tv shows, music, and the rest of our human creativity.

I wrote at the top that I’m a big fan of the Internet Archive. I really do appreciate their work. For example, it enabled me to see the earliest versions of my first technology consulting company’s website. (Cringe.)

A perhaps more useful example: As a cocktail enthusiast, I enjoy drinking out of “Nick & Nora” glasses, named for the main characters in The Thin Man movies. But I’d never seen the movie, and it was challenging to find it to purchase or stream.

But the Internet Archive had a copy, and I was able to finally watch and enjoy this absolutely delightful movie.

(It’s now available almost everywhere, from Amazon to Apple TV+ to YouTube. Progress, I suppose, but what happens when the studio—or the streaming service—decides to pull it? This is also why I buy movies I care about on Blu-Ray, and rip/archive them myself.)

We need to ensure gems like these aren’t lost.

I’ve known Kira, the daughter of my good friends Ron and Irene Lue-Sang, since she was a day old. She was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes (T1D) nearly a decade ago. Since 2015, the Lue-Sang family have helped raise funds to end T1D by walking in the annual Breakthrough T1D Walk (formerly JDRF). They’re fundraising ahead of the next walk on October 13, and I’m asking for your help in reaching their goal of raising $10,000.

If you’re unfamiliar with T1D:

Type 1 diabetes (T1D) is an autoimmune disease that is diagnosed in both children and adults and has nothing to do with diet or lifestyle.

As the Lue-Sangs note on their fundraising page:

When you have T1D, your body stops producing insulin—a hormone essential to turning food into energy. Managing the disease is a constant struggle that involves monitoring your blood-sugar level, administering insulin, and carefully balancing these insulin doses with your eating and activity.

Kira wears a continuous glucose monitor to check her blood sugar levels, and an “insulin infusion set”, which, Ron explains, are:

steel needles that stay embedded in her thigh or tricep to slowly do the work of providing the insulin her pancreas no longer produces.

Managing T1D is challenging for anyone; it requires constant attention: measuring carbs, checking blood sugar levels, injecting just the right amount of insulin around meals, adjusting throughout the day as needed, replacing those steel needles and sensors every few days…. It’s a lot, especially for a teenager who just wants to be a teenager. As Ron put it,

There’s simply too much life to live for an active teenager to be bothered…. 

But bother she must, because failing to be vigilant every day could mean having

blood sugars so low that she shouldn’t walk around unaccompanied, or blood sugar so high for so long that she might not be getting insulin at all. Either situation could end in her passing out, ending up in the hospital, or damaging her internal organs (eyes, kidneys, heart) a little bit at a time.

Parents may expect to argue with their kids about various dangers in life (like riding a motorcycle, or driving too fast), and to be dismissed as being overprotective and paranoid. As a T1D parent, those arguments unexpectedly shift from “Check your mirrors before changing lanes!” to “check your blood sugar before starting the car!”

Elizabeth Stone said that having a child is “to have your heart go walking around outside your body.”

Raising a T1D teen must be like having your heart roar off to school on a motorcycle every day.

The work Breakthrough T1D does helps further the science of living with T1D. Ron tells me:

One hundred years ago, science had barely discovered insulin. Before that, people with Type 1 Diabetes just wasted away a few months or years after diagnosis. 

Ten years ago our standard of care was pricking Kira’s fingers to check blood sugar levels at least four times a day and injecting insulin by hand. We’re grateful for the advances technology has brought, including modern insulin, continuous glucose monitors, and insulin pumps. But we believe—it’s an article of faith—that there are still more advances to come, if only we pursue them. 

If you can, please make a contribution to Breakthrough T1D to help them pursue those advances. Any amount helps, whether it’s $1, $10, or $100. No parent should agonize over the health of their kid, and no kid should have to stick steel needles into her thigh.

The Lue-Sang family thanks you, and I thank you.

Four years on, and this day—September 9, 2020—remains my most surreal and enduring memory of the pandemic.

Waking up during the 7 o’clock hour in early September in San Francisco usually means blinking away sunlight as it streams into our bedroom, while I fumble to snooze my iPhone alarm. Instead, it was curiously dark.

I didn’t think much of it as I stumbled through my morning ablutions and overnight work email catchup. It was 9 a.m. before I happened to peek out of our back window.

Six months into the pandemic lockdown, and I legitimately thought we’d finally reached Armageddon.

Our usually bright, almost Autumn morning was dark. Street lamps remained on, and morning songbirds stayed eerily silent. The pandemic lockdown already meant our neighborhood was quieter than usual, but this morning the streets were Zombie Apocalypse-level deserted.

It was hauntingly quiet.

Between meetings, I wandered down to Cole Valley. The N Judah station looked like the long-abandoned remnant of a distant civilization, and the usually bustling corner of Cole and Parnassus had but a few hardy souls brunching, as a lone dog walked its human.

My SFBA Friends iMessage group chat blew up that morning as we commiserated. “It’s the rapture,” cried Michael.

“I’m officially done with this year,” lamented Lisa.

“Me too,” agreed Kelly. “I think today’s orange sky is the day I finally lost it.”

We weren’t the only ones. Bay Area Twitter lit up, and the skies made national headlines, with some incredible photos.

The combination of the usual San Francisco fog, coupled with massive wildfires throughout the Bay Area, had conspired to blot out the sun and turn the sky a dusky orange this day four years ago. These images are now indelibly etched into my brain.

Every month or so, a few friends and I gather for a whiskey tasting. For July, Tammy Tan (SpiceHound, Kitchen 519) and Anton Yulo (Meryenda) joined me in a West Coast Whiskey Club (WCWC) blind tasting of seven Russell’s Reserve whiskies. 

This represents most of their lineup, minus the Single Barrel Rye. Here’s what we poured:

• 10 year Bourbon (90 proof)
• K&L Exclusive Warehouse TY-K, Level 4 (110 proof)
• 13 year Bourbon (114.8 proof)
• 15 year Bourbon (117.2 proof)
• Single Rickhouse Bourbon Camp Nelson F (117.6 proof)
• WCWC Exclusive Camp Nelson E (110 proof)
• 6 year Rye (90 proof)

We tasted and discussed the pours together, then ranked them individually. While the three of us have similar, yet distinct preferences in our whiskies, throughout the tasting our preferences were clear and those differences didn’t really show up. Two bottles were early favorites, and another two were immediate dislikes. The battle, really, was for the middle of the pack.

As whiskey drinkers, we are trained that “older is better,” and our assumption was our two favorites were the 13- and 15-year bourbons, and our least favorites were the 6-year rye and 10-year bourbon.

We were half right.

We ended up ranking our top four whiskies in exactly the same order:

1. K&L Exclusive
2. WCWC Exclusive
3. Single Rickhouse
4. 13 year Bourbon

Our final three is where we diverged, slightly:

This differed from the overall WCWC rankings, which put the 13- and 15- year at the top, though we did align on the 10-year bourbon and 6-year rye being among our least favorites.

The 10-year is an approachable introduction for new bourbon drinkers; for cocktails which need the alcohol and flavor profile of bourbon, but won’t miss the nuance (say, a Kentucky Mule); or perhaps in baking.

The rye will appeal to those who enjoy its spicy profile (and, I think it would make for a killer Manhattan).

The 13- and 15-year, and Single Rickhouse bourbons are all limited releases, and retail for $150, $250, and $300, respectively—though you’d be hard pressed to find them for those prices; more likely double that. They would make great gifts for the bourbon lover who appreciates hard-to-get allocations.

The Exclusives, though, can be smoking good deals, usually $75–$100 a bottle. Most large retailers are likely to have one (e.g. BevMo, Total Wine), and smaller shops with a strong whiskey selection (like K&L) are likely to have their own picks, too.

If I were spending my own money, I’d grab a single barrel exclusive pick from Warehouse TY-K or TY-Q (e.g. this ParisTown from K&L). If I were spending someone else’s money, I might splurge on the Single Rickhouse—or maybe just explore a few exclusive bottles.

While I was writing about the Dungeons & Dragons stamp, I discovered—for reasons unknown, and much to my annoyance—that the USPS Postal Store prevents you from copying text from its website. 

This annoys me on any website, but for a government-run agency, it seems like an especially misguided idea. Heck, it might even be disallowed under Section 105 of the Copyright Law of the United States (Title 17), which says 

Copyright protection under this title is not available for any work of the United States Government….

This suggests there should be no reason they’d prevent copying. More broadly though, I don’t understand the desire for any website to block this basic functionality. It’s user hostile. Anyone motivated enough to copy stuff will find ways of doing so, even if it means retyping it, screenshotting it, or, as any self-respecting geek would do, finding a technical workaround to the problem.

First, let me acknowledge that the effort I put into addressing this issue, while minimal, was still greater than simply retyping the text from the site, or taking a screenshot and copying the text that way. The effort, of course, is beside the point for us geeks. It’s the principle of the matter. Information wants to be free, and I’ll be damned if I can’t copy text on my own computer!

Fortunately, USPS.com made this easy on me by using a method to prevent copying that’s easily worked around: The user-select CSS property.

I assume you know at least the basics of CSS. If not, I recommend reading this primer, but very briefly, CSS lets you style how content looks on a website, and how people interact with it. A style sheet contains the definitions, or instructions, for that styling. One of the features of CSS is you can override styles by providing new definitions. Safari provides a mechanism to add your own styles to all websites. I’ll use that ability to override the USPS.com user-select definition with my own.

(Note: This is Mac- and Safari-specific. There are ways of doing this in other browsers, and on Windows/Android, but I don’t use them.)

First, I’ll create a new style sheet that disables the relevant property. Then, I’ll tell Safari to use it. Finally, I’ll reload the page and copy copy copy!

Create a style sheet. user-select tells browsers how to handle content selection. USPS.com sets it to none, preventing any content selection. I want that to be auto (the browser default) which allows selecting—and thus copying—content. I need the !important flag so the browser gives my new definition a higher priority than the one coming from the website. Finally, I want this to apply to everything on the page, so I’ll use * instead of a specific HTML tag, class, or identifier.

I created a file, which I called nof—you.css, with the following content:

* {
    -webkit-user-select: auto !important;
    user-select: auto !important;
}

(Surprisingly, user-select is not a web standard yet, so most browsers prefix it to indicate it’s a browser-specific implementation. -webkit-user-select is for Safari’s current implementation, and user-select is for when the property (eventually) becomes a standard. Other prefixes exist, such as -moz-user-select and -ms-user-select, but again, I care only about Safari.)

Tell Safari to use this style sheet. In Safari, I opened Settings, then the Advanced tab. I clicked on the Style Sheet popup menu and selected Other…, and chose my nof—you.css file. Safari will now use this css on any website I load.

Reload the page. After reloading the USPS Store page, I’m now able to select and copy the text.

What’s great about this solution is it works for any site that uses user-select. I can either leave the CSS file always enabled (so I won’t even notice that a site was blocking selection); or I can disable it (select None from the Style Sheet popup) and re-enable it when necessary.

I think I’ll do the latter so I can emphatically spit out F— me? No, f– you! as I enable it.

Bonus Screenshot Option: I mentioned above taking a screenshot as a way to get around copy blocking. Here’s a brief overview of how you do that. (Again, this is only for Apple systems.) Take a screenshot on your Mac, iPhone or iPad, or take a photo with the Camera. In Photos, use the Live Text feature to select and copy the text. Voila. It still feels like getting away with something, but ultimately, gives me a less visceral f—you! experience.

Your mileage may vary.

This poster hangs prominently in our home, visible to your left after you enter the front door, as you take off your shoes. It’s a newspaper ad that ran in the San Francisco Call in March 1913 to stoke sales of the yet-to-be-built Forest Hill neighborhood of San Francisco, where we now live.

The ad—one of a series of at least ten published by the Newell-Murdoch company—touted the virtues of the new neighborhood, including its proximity to downtown, the return on investment, and the fresh air and sunshine. Many were implicitly or explicitly directed to “the man” who provided for his family (“Where do your wife and children live?” asks one). All contained the typical flowery language of real estate developers. And they all referenced “restricted residence.”

At the end of June, I wrote about the difficulty Willie Mays had when he was buying a house in the Sherwood Forest neighborhood of San Francisco, in the late ’50s; in it, I said:

He later bought another home, this time in Forest Hill, the neighborhood I currently live in, where the neighbors seemed less racist.

We love Forest Hill. We’ve lived here for about eighteen months now. It’s walkable, easily accessible by public transportation, and quiet. It’s a five minute stroll down the hill to West Portal, which has a cute “downtown strip” filled with lovely shops and restaurants.

It’s a great area; and while it may have been more welcoming of Black residents in the 1960s compared to Sherwood Forest, like much of San Francisco—and America—when it comes to housing discrimination, it has a racist past.

When we moved into the neighborhood, the homeowners’ association provided a packet sharing some of the history of the area. Part of Adolph Sutro’s vast estate, it was originally a large forest on a hill—talk about your creative naming! The forest was mostly leveled and converted to a residential planned community in the early 1900s.

Learning that Willie Mays lived here—helping to integrate the area in the ’60s—piqued my curiosity. I found the Forest Hill page on OutsideLands.org. Not much about Willie, but this caught my eye:

Forest Hill followed the example of other residence parks, imposing strict requirements on everything from building design to the racial identity of its residents. (Read a typical flyer.)

“Racial identity of its residents,” eh? I knew what that meant. I’ve seen enough homeowner CC&Rs—Covenants, Conditions and Restrictions—which needed to have discriminatory language struck because it no longer comported with modern sensibilities.

This was different.

The “typical flyer” mentioned by Outside Lands was a textual recreation of the newspaper ad at the top. It starts with the expected flowery language: Forest Hill as an Investment, distinctive exclusiveness, the finest place in San Francisco to live, and so on.

Then, in the fifth paragraph, things turned.

So shocked was I by the language in the ad, I refused to believe it could be real. There was no image, no link that might lend it credence.

I needed to find a copy, and see it in context for myself.

For all the issues modern search engines have, one undeniably great thing is they make it easy to find the proverbial needle in a vast internet haystack. Twenty years ago my eyes would be bleary from spending my afternoons scrolling through microfiche in a stuffy library. Instead, I was able to plug in the remarkably specific phrases and almost immediately pulled up the scanned newsprint.

There was the ad, taking up three quarters of the broadsheet. I stared at it on my screen, reading the copy, slack-jawed. At the bottom of the center column above the fold, were these words:

There are restrictions that safeguard the person of taste and refinement who seeks exclusiveness. There are no Mongols, Africans or “shack builders” allowed in Forest Hill. When a man selects a homesite in this tract it is done with the positive assurance that there will be nothing disagreeable to mar the serenity of the most fastidious.

I was gobsmacked.

I am Black (or “African”); my wife, Chinese (“Mongol”). I’m not exactly sure who “shack builders” was meant to impugn , but I’m confident it’s a slur against some immigrant community. (The Irish contractors who remodeled our home believe it meant their people.)

What shocked me about this ad wasn’t the language, which I understand was commonplace in everyday life in the early 1900s—jarring to read, but not shocking.

No, what truly shocked me was to see those words in an ad. In a newspaper. Published for all to see. It’s not coded. There’s no “dog whistle.” It’s perhaps a bit less direct than “only persons of the White or Caucasian race” but it’s pretty damn close.

Some people may shy away from this racist history, ignoring it in the hope that it recedes into the mists of time.

Not me. Forgetting means repeating. We keep this in a prominent place in the home we would’ve been denied buying a century ago as a striking reminder to us and everyone who visits that history is neither static nor abstract. Living in this house, displaying this ad, it reinforces the truth that ideas and ideologies shift. Change may happen slowly, but change does happen.

I’m remembering our past so I can imagine our future.

See this ad and others in the series in full context. I found ten of them; there may be more. All links except the final one are from the Library of Congress’ Chronicling America. The last one is from Newspapers.com.

• Country Life in the Center of San Francisco
• View from one of the homesites
• Forest Hill as an Investment
• Nature is calling your children to Forest Hill
• Where do your wife and children live?
• Do you know what Unearned Increment means?
• The Home is the Cradle of Humanity
• When is a man’s property worth more than his good name?
• A Look into the future
• Houses planned by M. Fisher

Some moments in our life we recognize immediately as capital-H Historic. They are seared into our memories. Mine include the Space Shuttle Challenger, Barack Obama, 9/11, and COVID-19.

What we witnessed on Saturday afternoon in Butler, Pennsylvania was certainly history. Assassination attempts on current or former presidents are, regrettably, much more common than we might expect—or like—in a democracy, and former president Donald Trump is now part of a sad American legacy of political violence, one perpetrated exclusively with guns.

Somehow, a man with an AR-15 style semi-automatic rifle managed to avoid Secret Service and local police, climb a roof, and shoot at the former president during an outdoor rally—grazing him in the ear, killing at least one attendee, and critically injuring two more. Mere fractions of an inch and this moment in time would be tragically Historic.

It may yet prove historic. One of Trump’s indisputable skills is that he instinctively intuits a media moment. Those instincts resulted in a photo for the ages. Getting shot at, clipped, and then rising, bloodied, fist raised in defiance, yelling “Fight!” to his audience… those optics may well solidify his supporters and propel him to the White House. A Hollywood screenwriter could scarcely script it better.

Which is not to say Trump is assured of—or somehow now deserves—another term. Nor does it mean that his opponents should stop calling out his dangerous rhetoric. Quite the opposite. It’s imperative they now work doubly hard to defeat him.

This abhorrent act against a former president and current presidential candidate must serve as a reminder that political violence is never acceptable, no matter the target, and that violent rhetoric has real-world repercussions. Yet we must not mistake from where that rhetoric often comes.

Just minutes after the shooting, J.D. Vance wrote on X/Twitter:

Today is not just some isolated incident.

The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs.

That rhetoric led directly to President Trump's attempted assassination.

This is transparent, self-serving bullshit. Vance is a leading vice presidential contender for a candidate who calls his opponents “vermin,” agitates for immigrants to be concentrated into camps and deported, and reportedly inspired 54 cases of violence, threats, and alleged assaults in his name. It’s unsurprisingly characteristic for their party to blame the other side rather than looking inward at their standard bearer.

President Biden’s call to “lower the temperature” is welcome and necessary, as long as we remember which side generates most of the heat.

It’s right for President Biden to call the attack “sick,” and state unequivocally that “there’s no place in America for this kind of violence,” even as the other side uses violent imagery.

It’s appropriate to call for “unity”, as long as we aren't meeting fascists “halfway” to fascism.

Meanwhile, let’s not ignore the nature of the assault itself. It is practically Shakespearean that the would-be assassin’s weapon of choice was an AR-15, which the GOP fetishizes and the NRA once called “America’s Rifle”. This is a party whose members wear AR-15 rifle pins, pose with assault-style rifles for Christmas, oppose gun-free zones (unless they’re in those zones), and have no intention of addressing gun violence.

Beyond “unity” and “lowered temperatures,” what we should be calling for are laws restricting access to AR-15 style assault weapons (and bump stocks, recently deemed legal again by the far-right Supreme Court majority), plus stricter restrictions on who can buy any gun and when.

I want Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer to immediately offer bills in the House and Senate today. Call it, I dunno, the “Tough Republicans Uniting for Maximum Protection Act” and dare Mike Johnson, Mitch McConnell, and the rest of the GOP to block it.

Taking the attempted assassination of a former president with an AR-15, and using it to ban those weapons?

That would make this moment absolutely Historic, in the best possible way.

I’m a big fan of the TV show Frasier. I’m now halfway through my third or fourth rewatch.

I was thinking recently of an episode, and wanted to look it up. I recalled the plot, and my first thought, as it is for most people seeking answers to simple trivia questions, was to turn to my nearest search engine. But I wasn’t sure how best to word the query, so I thought I’d give ChatGPT a shot, as I’m always looking for reasons to explore its capabilities. I could ask it in plain English, and as it’s likely slurped up all of IMDB.com, frasier.fandom.com, Wikipedia, and so on, it should have a comprehensive grasp of television episode facts.

Whoo boy, was I wrong.

ChatGPT, if you don’t follow the news, is an artificial intelligence chatbot powered by (it says in its self-description) a “vast amount of text from the internet, books, and other sources.” You type or talk in plain language, and thanks to fast computers and fancy math, it can “mimic human language patterns and provide relevant and coherent responses.” It’s often used to polish prose, write code, or brainstorm ideas.

It can also answer questions.

So I asked ChatGPT if it was familiar with Frasier. Things started out great.^[1]

Yes, I’m familiar with the TV show “Frasier.” It is an American sitcom that aired from 1993 to 2004. The show is a spin-off of “Cheers” and follows Dr. Frasier Crane, a psychiatrist who moves back to his hometown of Seattle and becomes a radio show host. The show features his interactions with his father Martin, his brother Niles, his producer Roz, and other characters. It is known for its witty dialogue, sophisticated humor, and strong character development. If you have any specific questions or need more information about “Frasier,” feel free to ask!

Cool, spot on. Let’s dive in.

There is an episode where Frasier and his brother Niles share an office, and have trouble working together. They are mediated by a fellow doctor to reconcile their working relationship. Are you familiar with that episode?

Yes, the episode you are referring to is titled “Rooms with a View” from the tenth season of “Frasier.” In this episode, Frasier and Niles decide to share an office space but soon find that their different working styles and personalities lead to conflict. They seek the help of a mediator, another doctor, to help them resolve their issues and find a way to work together harmoniously. The episode showcases their sibling rivalry and contrasting personalities, leading to humorous and insightful moments.

Hm. That description is right, but I was pretty sure it was from earlier in the series, season 3 or 4 perhaps. So I looked up “Rooms with a View” on IMDB and Frasier Fandom and nope, that episode, s10e8, wasn’t the right one. I said so.

No. Rooms with a view is about Niles having open heart surgery.^[2]

This is where things got absurd.

I apologize for the confusion. The episode you’re referring to is likely “Sharing Kirby,” which is in the ninth season of “Frasier.” However, it doesn’t quite fit your description. Let me correct that:

The episode you’re thinking of is “Bristle While You Work (Part 1),” from Season 10, Episode 4. In this episode, Frasier and Niles share an office space and struggle to work together due to their clashing personalities and work habits. To help mediate their conflicts, they bring in Dr. Schachter, a professional mediator, to assist them in reconciling their working relationship.

First, it apologies, giving an impression of contriteness and a determination to do better.

It again offers a correct description, and the doctor’s name is also right. “Sharing Kirby” is, in fact, a Season 9 episode, and it even recognizes it’s the wrong episode and corrects itself.

But oh! the confidence of its self-correction: “The episode you’re thinking of is....” Not “might be,” “is likely,” or any such qualifiers.

Yet despite its confidence, it’s also doubly wrong! s10e4 is “Kissing Cousin”, not “Bristle While You Work”; that’s actually s10e7.

Some people might call these incorrect answers “alternative facts.” The preferred term in some circles is “confabulations,” but the popular term is “hallucinations.”

I don’t like that term. It ascribes a humanity and basis in reality these tools simply don’t have, as if it’s a benign sensory mismatch to be indulged, like your doddering Uncle Jack swatting at unseen insects.

But there is no humanity in a bot, and “hallucination” mischaracterizes its impact. When Uncle Jack dodges mosquitoes that aren’t there, you might tut-tut in sympathy, but you don’t run to the corner store to pick up a can of Flit. Only Uncle Jack is affected by his hallucinations.

As much as a quarter of what these AI chatbot and search tools generate is factually incorrect. When it’s a wrong TV episode, the worst outcome is you look foolish in a pub trivia game. When they suggest you eat rocks or add paste to your pizza sauce, you may chuckle and move on, but this trivializes the issue. An AI “hallucination” is potentially deadly.

People have learned to trust the results of search engines and, by extension, chatbots. If it’s at the top of the results, it’s the “best link.” If you get a confidently written response from a bot, it must be correct. Because computers.

But this trust is misplaced because AI chatbots and search engines aren’t fact-based. They don’t know the “right answers.” They make shit up. They are, fundamentally, token prediction machines.

Imagine you have a deck of playing cards, arranged just so:

A♣️ 4♥️ 7♠️ 10♦️ K♣️ 3♥️ 6♠️ 9♦️ Q♣️ 2♥️ 5♠️ ???

Based on the pattern, you can probably predict the next card in the sequence^[3]. Combined with some clever patter, you can convince people you’re psychic.

AI chatbots perform similarly. The sequences and predictions are infinitely more complex, and—because those sequences are words and sentences—the responses seem human. But it’s all pattern-based bullshit.

Our acceptance of this BS as truth is dictated both by our knowledge of the topic at hand and our personal level of skepticism. When delivered confidently, we’re even more accepting of its veracity. A plausible response stated as fact, and which matches our expectations, registers as true.

If it feels right, we accept it as right.

Back to my Frasier queries, where ChatGPT continued to confidently give me wrong answers. In one it wrote:

I apologize for the continued errors. The episode you are referring to is “Sweet Dreams,” Season 5, Episode 24. This is the correct episode where Frasier and Niles share an office and face difficulties working together, eventually seeking the help of a mediator to resolve their issues.

“The episode you are referring to is… This is the correct episode.” No qualifiers, no hedging, just straight-up stated as fact.

Imagine conversing with someone who lied with such unabashed conviction? You might feel compelled to believe him^[4]. You can’t be that confident and be wrong! Yet the only thing right about this response is that s5e24 is in fact called “Sweet Dreams”. But, “this is the correct episode.”

It’s like being gaslighted by an apologetic psychopath.

I eventually gave up and found the episode myself^[5], and asked ChatGPT one final question.

Are you familiar with s3e2?

To which it confidently replied

Yes, Season 3, Episode 2 of “Frasier” is titled “Shrink Rap.” In this episode, Frasier and Niles try to collaborate on a book about sibling relationships, but they struggle with their differing personalities and viewpoints.

They seek the help of Dr. Honey Snow, a family therapist, to assist them in overcoming their differences and completing their project.

Sigh. The “book about sibling relationships” is from s1e22 (“Author, Author”). In “Shrink Rap” they seek the help of Dr. Schachter, not Dr. Honey Snow—who wasn’t a family therapist, and wasn’t in either s3e2 or s1e22; she was in s2e15, “You Scratch My Book...”.

But it got the title right!

Wow, 248 years old! Just a couple more until the big 250! I know you’re already busy planning a huge semiquincentennial.

I hope you make it.

I know, I know, technically you’re only 236 if we count from the ratification of your Constitution, but you know we all like to count your Declaration of Independence as your real birthday.

(Admit it, you prefer that too.)

However you count, you’re still the oldest living democracy. Even Athens, your birthplace, didn’t make it past what, two hundred? And here you are closing in on a quarter millennia!

Remember when you were, what? 165, 166? You went off with your friends to fight Nazism. You were a Big Damn Hero back then. Can you believe after all that effort, Nazism is making a comeback, right here at home?

By your 200th, you’d finally started to recover from that fight, and your unfortunate “excursions” into South Korea and Vietnam, and were looking to put the legacy of Jim Crow behind you.

Though I guess Jim Crow never really went away, huh? It just sort of became... institutionalized.

We both thought you’d finally overcome that legacy when you turned 232, but just eight years later, you suffered what looked like an allergic reaction. You were so angry all the time, so divided. All of us feared you were nearing the end. We weren’t sure you’d even make it four years. Then you got real sick, and had to isolate yourself for a while. Those were some dark, dark days.

Though the fever broke, many of the symptoms persisted. There was that unprecedented flareup the January you were turning 245. That one really scared us. We thought for sure you were a goner.

To be brutally honest, the last seven or eight years feel a lot like it did when you were in your early 80s, and we’re not only worried about another episode like the one you had when you were 85, some people are explicitly threatening us with it. Just imagine, people want to put you through that again. You almost died then, you’re unlikely to survive another.

It might be time to take a good, long look at yourself in the mirror and be honest about how you got sick then, and how it’s still impacting you today.

Yes, sadly, you’re still very sick. Your major institutions are failing, and your little cousin, the Fourth Estate, is collapsing with you.

But as ill as you are, you’re also strong and determined. You’ve weathered so much. You’ve tossed aside kings, courts, and wannabe tyrants before.

And we have good people working to heal you. It’s touch-and-go right now, but we must have faith in you.

So, happy birthday, America. Hang in there. See you at 250.

Despite daily use of an iPhone since they first became available—gasp—17 years ago this weekend, I still sometimes find myself flummoxed by some behavior or other. Today, it was this:

On iOS (or iPadOS) in Settings (assuming you’re signed into your iCloud account), you should see Your Name at the top of the screen, along with either your initials in a circle or an image you’ve selected.

Instead, it was “GU”, with the initials-in-a-circle default, but not my initials of “JG”. I tapped my name, and then the GU initials, and the name shown was “Guest User.”

Interesting… iOS doesn’t have a “guest user” mode. And it was happening on two devices signed into the same iCloud account.

Hm.

I struggled to find an answer, so I threw it out to Mastodon, and then in typical fashion, I answered my own question a short while after.

(If the best way to get a right answer is to give a wrong answer, the best way to answer your own question is to ask it.)

I knew the name was taken from the Contacts app, specifically the My Card setting. Sure enough, the Contacts app showed My Card was “Guest User”: first name Guest, last name User, with an otherwise empty Contacts entry. I have no idea how or why that contact card was created, nor why it was selected.

On macOS, I would select the contact I wanted to be My Card, then select Card > Make This My Card from the menu.

I couldn’t find a way to do this in the Contacts app on iOS.

That’s because it’s not in the Contacts app. It’s in Settings, under Contacts > My Info, from where you can then choose your contact card. Of course! iOS apps rarely have preferences within them; they’re usually in the Settings app.

(You can also change this in Settings under Siri & Search > My Information. I don’t know why it’s in two places, other than Siri uses this information.)

The Fix (in summary)

If your iCloud account name in Settings is unexpectedly incorrect, here’s how you fix it:

1. On iOS (or iPadOS), open Contacts and confirm My Card has the wrong name.
2. Optional: If the contact is otherwise empty, delete it: Tap the name, tap Edit, tap Delete (at the bottom).
3. Open Settings, scroll to and tap Contacts > My Info. (Alternatively: Siri & Search > My Information.)
4. Select the correct contact. Create a new one if necessary.

So, there you have it: a minor mystery solved.

I love a good mystery. As a little boy, I read Encyclopedia Brown, the Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew series, all of Agatha Christie’s works, and Sherlock Holmes. Solving mysteries probably goes a long way to explaining why I love computers.

I recently stumbled across a couple of very old books, gifts from my parents in 1985: Alfred Hitchcock’s Daring Detectives, a collection of eleven “Exciting Stories of Great Feats of Detection” featuring Ellery Queen, Dame Agatha’s Hercule Poirot, Perry Mason, and more; and an anthology of five of Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple novels.

You may be able to tell I read the snot out of these.

I also found 12 issues of Stanford University’s facsimiles of The Strand Magazine featuring Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “consulting detective.”

The Strand Magazine was a monthly publication which was, among other things, the first to publish the Sherlock Holmes stories. It also serialized The Hound of the Baskervilles in 1901. According to Wikipedia,

Readers lined up outside the magazine’s offices, waiting to get the next installment.

Can you imagine doing that in today’s binge culture? Even weekly episode drops bug me now.

Back in 2006/2007, as part of Stanford’s exploration of the Victorian era, they published these facsimiles and sent them monthly—for free—to anyone who requested them. I couldn’t resist.

They published 24 issues, but I foolishly only signed up for the first half. Fortunately, that half included The Hound of the Baskervilles, serialized and made available monthly just as they were to readers in 1901. I loved waiting for, and then devouring each issue.

They’ve long since discontinued publication, but they’ve kept the website up. You can download all the individual issues as PDFs, though it’s not obvious how to get to all of them, so as a public service, below are the direct download links for each issue.

If you’d like to save yourself two dozen clicks, I’ve compiled them all into a single zip file you can download. I also renamed the PDF files for consistency.

Series 1, 2006

Series 2, 2007

Try reading them one per month for the full experience!

Marques Brownlee (MKBHD) tackles the eternal product marketing question of “Product or Feature” when it comes to AI.

He highlights the Humane Ai Pin and Rabbit R1 as examples of “AI as a product,” that is, a standalone thing you buy that “does AI,” versus being integrated into existing products, such as a phone or smart home device.

Both the Humane Pin and Rabbit R1 require AI for them to be useful. Without AI, they are merely interesting hardware products that provide no meaningful functionality. Everything they do with AI can easily be (and perhaps already is being) done on a phone, either via an app or integrated into the system. The unique hardware bits they have exist solely because they’re not phones and need some mechanism for us to interact with them. A phone without AI is still useful. A Humane Pin without AI is… what? An attractive accessory?

AI is an enabling technology. People aren’t buying AI. They’re buying what AI can do for them. The question for any company selling an “AI product” is “to do what?”

If the what can be incorporated into another, more popular or widely used product, that “AI product” is in danger of being obsoleted, or at least becoming less relevant.

Marques uses the once-popular Clubhouse to highlight this transition. The enabling technology for Clubhouse was “live voice chatrooms”. However, the product was effectively obsoleted after other companies incorporated this feature into their own, more popular apps. People didn’t want Clubhouse, per se. They just wanted to chat with each other.

It’s likely we’ll see this happen a lot more for “AI products.” As Marques points out, Apple’s WWDC Keynote showcased many features powered by AI. In almost every instance, products that do “that thing” already exist today. Such products may soon become superfluous to a large number of Apple’s customers, because customers care about the feature, not the product.

One example: The next versions of iOS and macOS bring the ability to “rewrite, proofread, and summarize text,” directly integrated into just about every text field on the systems. This is huge for Apple customers. But if you’re, say, Grammarly, for whom “AI writing partner” is what you sell, you’re now competing with Apple in your only business. Feature, not product.

This isn’t to say Grammarly goes away. They provide some features not offered in Apple’s version, and as they noted to NPR:

Whenever new entrants come into our market, the reality is that we see increased demand for Grammarly.

OK, sure. But how many people will pay $12/month when they can get a basic “AI writing partner” for free?

As Apple demonstrated, it’s possible to build your own AI stack, and subsume AI-powered features, making them “just another bullet point” on a deck or press release.

Look at ChatGPT, for instance. Despite being the best-known, most popular AI chatbot, it was the last item mentioned in Apple’s two-thousand-word Apple Intelligence press release. And it won’t even be the only chatbot available on Apple’s devices. Eventually you’ll be able to replace ChatGPT with Anthropic’s Claude, Google Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, and who knows what else. Feature, not product.

And dollars to doughnuts, Apple already plans to Sherlock all of these chatbots, as they do with so many other features-pretending-to-be-products.

So is AI a Product or a Feature? Marques demurs:

Now there is no answer yet as far as is AI actually a feature or a product, which one will win, which one will lose, we don't know. But I think if history is any indication, I do think that more people in the long run are going to end up using this AI stuff as a feature, more than going to, like, a standalone thing.

I agree that for most people AI will simply be the technology that powers features they love. They won’t go seeking out AI, and won’t buy standalone “AI products”. In fact, most won’t think about AI at all.

The trajectory technology takes is to transition from a visionary product to an important feature of another product to a mundane feature used without thinking.

A great example comes from my friend Ron Lue-Sang: Biometric authentication.

In popular media, fingerprints, facial recognition, and retina scans once demonstrated just how advanced the civilization (or organization) was. Visionary.

Then biometrics were added to products like door locks as a key reason to buy them. Important.

Today we unthinkingly unlock our phones and computers with our fingers and faces. Mundane.

Companies will continue to sell “AI products” for as long as they can, and many of them will exist as foundational technologies and find ways to differentiate themselves, but most are on a glide path toward irrelevance. For me, and I think for most people, AI is absolutely a feature, not a product, and one we won’t even think of as AI.

So perhaps the question isn’t “is AI a product or a feature?”

Perhaps it’s “when will AI become mundane?”

As an Apple nerd, the week of WWDC is both a great and a terrible time to launch something new. Almost no one will pay attention to this new website, yet it gives me much to write about.

If you’re also an Apple nerd (and if you’re reading this, there’s an above-average chance you are), Apple’s annual Worldwide Developer Conference offers a ton to explore, learn, and generally obsess over. For many, it sets the direction for the rest of their year, acting as something of a launching pad, a new beginning.

For over two decades, WWDC was a major focal point of my year. I worked in Apple’s Worldwide Developer Relations organization (WWDR), which puts on the show, and the team I was on, Developer Technical Support (DTS), was an integral part of it.

Months of long days, sleepless nights, and endless planning meetings culminated with WWDC Monday. It was immensely gratifying to see the results of many months of hard work from the teams make it to the stage or screen. And while much of what was announced at any given show was a surprise to me, my excitement was generally tempered by having already spent a lot of time living on the new software.

Not so this year. It’s my first WWDC “on the outside” since 2001^[1], and my anticipation for what’s new was sky-high.

Restraint

Leading up to WWDC, there was much speculation about what Apple would do with AI, and its impact on the company’s fortunes.

Apple answered, but they sure took their time.

Monday’s Keynote (anchored by Craig Federighi) was effectively two events. The first sixty minutes was the normal annual updates of Apple’s software product lineup: All the new features coming in iOS 18, iPadOS 18, tvOS 18, watchOS 11, macOS Sequoia, and visionOS 2, with a surprisingly long Apple TV+ segment. Despite the hype, there wasn’t a single mention of “AI” or “artificial intelligence” in this first hour.

I must applaud Apple’s restraint here. I speculated last week,

What if Apple announces “Siri AI” and says it’s “Advanced Interactions” or “Apple Intelligence”?

“Edit your photos using your voice. Powered by Siri AI….”

“Xcode 16 helps you write code twice as fast using Siri AI.…”

“In the newly improved Developers Forums, you can quickly find answers to your code-level questions thanks to Siri AI….”

They get to utter “AI” a bunch of times, but make it distinct from “artificial intelligence”.

It would be very Apple to try to redefine what AI means.

🤔

What I expected was a presentation littered with “AI” droppings to satisfy those carping about Apple falling behind in AI. Instead, Apple stuck to their usual language as they highlighted new features enabled by “intelligent capabilities”, “machine learning”, and “powerful new algorithms”, just as they have for years.

It was in the back forty minutes that we finally got what for many people was the main attraction: The introduction of “Apple Intelligence”, Apple’s name^[2] for their on-device, privacy-focused, and deeply integrated take on artificial intelligence.

Apple Intelligence

Tim Cook introduced Apple Intelligence this way:

At Apple, it’s always been our goal to design powerful personal products that enrich people’s lives, by enabling them to do the things that matter most, as simply and easily as possible.

We’ve been using artificial intelligence and machine learning for years to help us further that goal. Recent developments in generative intelligence and large language models offer powerful capabilities that provide the opportunity to take the experience of using Apple products to new heights.

So as we look to build in these incredible new capabilities, we want to ensure that the outcome reflects the principles at the core of our products. It has to be powerful enough to help with the things that matter most to you. It has to be intuitive and easy to use. It has to be deeply integrated into your product experiences. Most importantly, it has to understand you, and be grounded in your personal context, like your routine, your relationships, your communications and more. And of course, it has to be built with privacy from the ground up. Together, all of this goes beyond artificial intelligence. It’s personal intelligence, and it’s the next big step for Apple.

I include the entire quote^[3] because I see this as Apple’s AI thesis. Their privacy-first approach to AI is all about experiences and functionality, not data collection. Technology as Infrastructure, not as a business model. Apple Intelligence gives Apple (and developers) the ability to craft experiences that are relevant to you, using the extraordinarily personal information available on your device, and without compromising your privacy.

This is the right approach. People care about what technology lets them do—or can do for them—not the technology itself. They buy a new iPhone because it “takes better photos” not because it has an “ƒ/1.78 aperture.” The technology enables the feature, but it’s not the feature.

For Apple, it’s not about AI, it’s about what AI enables.

What sets Apple Intelligence apart from other offerings are Siri’s deep integration with the system, on-device processing, and new cloud server infrastructure.

With Siri’s improved integrations, better natural language understanding, and awareness of my personal contexts, my iPhone, iPad, and Mac—which already know more about me than my wife or mom—will be able to use that knowledge even more directly.

It’ll do this without needing to go to the cloud. Much of Apple Intelligence will be processed locally, which is a massive win for both speed and privacy. (It does require devices with the latest Apple silicon: iPhone 15 Pro, or any M-family iPad or Mac. One can presume any new phones announced this year will work.)

For requests too complex to process locally, Apple’s new cloud server infrastructure adds scalability. Private Cloud Compute uses Apple silicon-powered servers created specifically for this task. Limited data is sent to those servers, the data is used only for your requests (not to train models for others), and then the data is deleted once the task is complete.

As Craig said,

You should not have to hand over all the details of your life to be warehoused and analyzed in someone’s AI cloud.

This is what differentiates Apple from everyone else doing AI, and why Apple remains one of the few companies I trust with vast amounts of my personal data. Apple Intelligence is built, as Tim noted, “in a uniquely Apple way.” They aren’t trying to monetize your data, so there’s no need to hold onto it. It’s a solution “only Apple” could make.

Siri

There were several demos showcasing the capabilities of Apple Intelligence. Many were tied to generative writing and images, done locally, and constrained to specific contexts. I found them interesting, but not exciting.

There were three examples which delighted me. All were tied to Siri’s deeper integration into and across the system:

1. You’re filling out a form and it requires your driver’s license. If you have a copy of your license in Photos, Siri will be able to find that photo, copy your license number, and type it into the form for you. I had this exact need just a few days ago. I had to launch Photos, search for “driver’s license”, tap on the text icon, and copy and paste the number. It was quite handy, as I didn’t have to leave the couch to grab my wallet, but I can’t wait until I can say “Siri, paste in my driver’s license number.”
2. A friend sends you a Message with his new address. You say to Siri “add this address to his contact card”. Siri knows what’s on your screen, what an address is, how to get and format an address, what “this” address refers to, what a “contact card” is, who “his” means, what it means to “add to contact card”, and how to add it to the Contacts app.
3. You’re picking your mom up from the airport. You ask Siri “what time is my mom’s flight landing?” Siri knows who “my mom” is, what flight she’s on (because of an email she sent earlier), and when it will land (because it can access real-time flight tracking). You follow up with “what’s our lunch plan?” Siri knows “our” means you and your mom, when “lunch” is, that it was discussed in a Message thread, and that it’s today. Finally, you ask “how long will it take us to get there from the airport?”. Siri knows who ”us” is, where “there” is, which airport is being referenced, where you are now, and real-time traffic conditions.

I’ve been dreaming about these types of interactions since first seeing Apple’s Knowledge Navigator concept video, where—among other futuristic things—an “intelligent agent” has such deep contextual knowledge about a professor, it jumps in—unprompted—with the answer to a forgotten appointment time.

History

The WWDC video opens with Phil Schiller flying an airplane filled with Apple executives^[4]. Craig is pumping them up ahead of the show, then they all parachute out above Apple Park. The airplane, the jumpsuits, and the parachutes themselves are all liveried in the six colors of the classic Apple logo. It’s a lovely callback to Apple’s history.

Ninety minutes later, toward the end of the event, Craig gives us the tag line for Apple Intelligence: AI for the rest of us.

This is another callback to the earliest ads for Macintosh, the computer for the rest of us, and I think it encapsulates everything about how Apple envisions their place within the broader AI ecosystem.

The original series of ads compared the graphical user interface and one-button mouse of Macintosh to DOS-based PCs where you typed in cryptic, text-based commands to get things done. In one ad, a Macintosh is removed from a zippered bag:

It’s more sophisticated, yet less complicated.

It’s more powerful, yet less cumbersome.

It can store vast amounts of yesterday, or tell you what’s in store for tomorrow.

It can draw pictures, or it can draw conclusions.

It’s a personal computer from Apple, and it’s as easy to use as this.

The ad ends with a finger pressing a mouse button, highlighting the simplicity of using a Macintosh.

With new visuals, and some minor changes to the narration, this could be an ad for Apple Intelligence.

It can’t be coincidence that a Keynote that opens by evoking the early days of Apple computing, ends with one too. Apple is saying there’s Artificial Intelligence, which is all about LLMs and models and prompt engineering, and which requires specialized knowledge and lots of typing to accomplish anything, and there’s Apple Intelligence, which uses context and relevance and personal knowledge to make it easy to be creative and productive.

The pundits worry Apple has fallen behind.

Apple is telling us this is just the beginning.

After 22 (and a half!) years at Apple, I’ll be going on an extended, open-ended sabbatical.

That is, I’m retiring.

I’ve spent my entire career at Apple in Developer Technical Support (DTS), part of Worldwide Developer Relations (WWDR). In my time, I've been fortunate enough to be a (small) part of every OS launch, hardware transition, and WWDC since April of 2001.

I’ve helped developers move from Carbon to Cocoa, Objective-C to Swift, PowerPC to Intel to Apple silicon, a “sweet solution” to native development. I’ve helped them ready apps for the introduction of iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, Apple Watch, and now Vision Pro.

I worked closely with App Review from its initial launch, and helped launch and lead the Mac App Review team.

I partnered with Inclusion and Diversity and University Recruiting to help bring focus to the hiring, retention, and growth of female and Black engineers across Apple, and I was honored to be on the leadership team for Women@Apple-Tech for two years, and Co-chair of Black@Apple (formerly African-American Employee Association) for seven years.

All of which is to say:

I’ve had the great good fortune to work with hundreds of the smartest people across Apple in pursuit of things that mattered.

Whether it was addressing an issue affecting thousands of developers; crafting and polishing a talk for WWDC, Grace Hopper or NSBE; or exploring race and gender in the industry, every day I was part of remarkable, thought-provoking, insightful discussions with people from across this amazing company.

Those discussions have educated me, challenged me, comforted me.

Steve said “the journey is the reward”. To all of my colleagues past and present, thank you for being a part of my journey, for making it rewarding beyond measure.

What's next?

For the first couple of months, I plan to relax and recharge, to “drain my brain”. After that, I’ll be reconnecting to some long-dormant hobbies, including photography, podcasting, and perhaps some writing.

Sometime next year I plan to launch an organization for the next generation of tech leaders of color. The focus will be on building important non-tech skills, facilitating conversations that go beyond pure engineering and technical discussions, and strengthening networks and community. I’m excited to use my experience and skills in different ways, to be a mentor and coach, to open doors, and show a path upward.