Daring Fireball

Ann Telnaes, from her personal site (alas) on Substack:

I’ve worked for the Washington Post since 2008 as an editorial cartoonist. I have had editorial feedback and productive conversations — and some differences — about cartoons I have submitted for publication, but in all that time I’ve never had a cartoon killed because of who or what I chose to aim my pen at. Until now.

The cartoon that was killed criticizes the billionaire tech and media chief executives who have been doing their best to curry favor with incoming President-elect Trump. There have been multiple articles recently about these men with lucrative government contracts and an interest in eliminating regulations making their way to Mar-a-lago. The group in the cartoon included Mark Zuckerberg/Facebook & Meta founder and CEO, Sam Altman/OpenAI CEO, Patrick Soon-Shiong/LA Times publisher, the Walt Disney Company/ABC News, and Jeff Bezos/Washington Post owner. [...]

As an editorial cartoonist, my job is to hold powerful people and institutions accountable. For the first time, my editor prevented me from doing that critical job. So I have decided to leave the Post. I doubt my decision will cause much of a stir and that it will be dismissed because I’m just a cartoonist. But I will not stop holding truth to power through my cartooning, because as they say, “Democracy dies in darkness”.

The only thing wrong with the cartoon is that she drew it too soon to include Tim Cook. The cartoon isn’t even particularly scathing. I’d describe it as tame even. It shows these moguls as offering money to Trump — which they are! What a bizarre decision by Telnaes’s editors. It’d be like me getting offended if someone drew a cartoon that showed me wasting money betting on the Dallas Cowboys. If the shoe fits you have to wear it.

This isn’t a sign that the Washington Post has taken another turn for the worse. It’s simply proof of what many of us wrote before the election, when Bezos kiboshed the Post editorial board’s endorsement of Kamala Harris. In one fell swoop that decision collapsed the entirety of The Washington Post’s editorial integrity. This Telnaes fiasco is just more proof. More will follow until Bezos sells.

Kelly Hooper, reporting for Politico on 9 January 2021:

The Biden Inaugural Committee on Saturday released its list of donors, which included Google, Microsoft, Boeing and several other major corporations. The list contains all contributors who donated more than $200 to President-elect Joe Biden’s Jan. 20 inauguration ceremony and related activities.

That website is now defunct, and the “bideninaugural.org” domain redirects (for the next 17 days) to “www.whitehouse.gov”, but Internet Archive has a capture from Inauguration Day, 20 January 2021.

Apple is not listed, and while there is a “Tim Cook” on the list, he’s listed as residing in Michigan.

All “great American traditions” have to start somewhere, and perhaps Tim Cook — the one from California, by way of Alabama — believes the great American tradition of donating money to presidential inaugural committees is only beginning now. Or, giving him the benefit of the doubt, perhaps he only saw fit to contribute $199 to Biden’s inauguration and thus wasn’t listed, and bumped his donation by $999,801 this time. You know, for “unity”.

(Thanks to reader Daniel Streicher for the link.)

Hard not to think of this clip today, re: an egomaniacal villain, whose worldview is frozen several decades in the past, setting the terms for an extortion racket.

Axios co-founder Mike Allen:

Apple CEO Tim Cook will personally donate $1 million to President-elect Trump’s inaugural committee, sources with knowledge of the donation tell Axios. [...]

Cook, a proud Alabama native, believes the inauguration is a great American tradition, and is donating to the inauguration in the spirit of unity, the sources said. The company is not expected to give.

Donald Trump tried to overthrow the legitimate results of the 2020 election to remain in office, and as part of his efforts, inspired a violent mob of insurrectionists to invade the U.S. Capitol and disrupt the peaceful transfer of power.

For that reason alone — there are, of course, many others, but to me, Trump’s betrayal of U.S. democracy itself remains paramount — this donation is gross and perverse. But I’m not sure it was feasible not to play ball here. In times like this, realpolitik is the only politics. I wouldn’t have the stomach to make this donation, and those of you disgusted by this likely don’t either. Few people are cut out to be the CEO of a large multinational company like Apple. Sometimes you have to eat the shit sandwich.

It seems pretty obvious that it was Apple/Cook that leaked this to Axios, not Trump’s side, given the eye-roll-inducing “proud American tradition” spin, but more especially the nugget that only Cook personally, not Apple as a company, is contributing. That’s Cook asking for any and all ire to be directed at him, personally, not Apple. Good luck with that.

Fascinating piece by Ben Cohen for The Wall Street Journal (News+ link):

And there are two things I learned about the EUV tool I saw that I can’t get out of my head:

1. ASML teamed up with a German optical company to develop mirrors so flat that if they were scaled up to the size of Germany itself, their largest imperfection would be less than a millimeter.

2. The precision of EUV machines is comparable to directing a laser beam from your house and hitting a ping-pong ball on the moon.

It took decades for these absurdly sophisticated machines to make their way from labs to fabs. And until recently, it wasn’t clear if the company’s audacious bet on EUV lithography would ever pay off. In 2012, ASML was strapped for cash and sold a 23% equity stake to Intel, Samsung Electronics and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, which meant its biggest customers were literally invested in the company’s success.

ASML soon ramped up production — very, very slowly. The company delivered the first EUV system in 2010. Not until 2020 did it deliver the 100th. And last year was a busy one: ASML shipped a total of 42 EUV machines.

The piece is also a profile of one ASML engineer, Brienna Hall, who is one of a small cadre of frontline support engineers who keep these machines operating perfectly. The article’s headline, though, is bizarrely framed to suggest that she’s the only such support engineer in the world. The weird headline distracts from an otherwise fascinating story.

Speaking of Simon Willison, I greatly enjoyed this post from last week, with some of the self-imposed principles he follows writing his excellent eponymous blog. Amongst them:

• I always include the names of the people who created the content I am linking to, if I can figure that out. Credit is really important, and it’s also useful for myself because I can later search for someone’s name and find other interesting things they have created that I linked to in the past. If I’ve linked to someone’s work three or more times I also try to notice and upgrade them to a dedicated tag. [...]
• If the original author reads my post, I want them to feel good about it. I know from my own experience that often when you publish something online the silence can be deafening. Knowing that someone else read, appreciated, understood and then shared your work can be very pleasant.
• A slightly self-involved concern I have is that I like to prove that I’ve read it. This is more for me than for anyone else: I don’t like to recommend something if I’ve not read that thing myself, and sticking in a detail that shows I read past the first paragraph helps keep me honest about that.

Every step of the way, I found myself nodding my head, thinking to myself, I do that too! — right down to creating tags for people after I’ve mentioned their work or simply credited their bylines a few times. (The difference is that Willison seemingly isn’t a procrastinator, and I am, so my decades of tagging aren’t yet exposed to anyone but me.)

Then I got to this:

There are a lot of great link blogs out there, but the one that has influenced me the most in how I approach my own is John Gruber’s Daring Fireball. I really like the way he mixes commentary, quotations and value-added relevant information.

And now it doesn’t seem quite as amazing that I was nodding my head in agreement with each of his guidelines. But, call me biased, it’s still a hell of a good start to a blogging rulebook.

Simon Willison:

A lot has happened in the world of Large Language Models over the course of 2024. Here’s a review of things we figured out about the field in the past twelve months, plus my attempt at identifying key themes and pivotal moments. [...]

I think telling people that this whole field is environmentally catastrophic plagiarism machines that constantly make things up is doing those people a disservice, no matter how much truth that represents. There is genuine value to be had here, but getting to that value is unintuitive and needs guidance.

Those of us who understand this stuff have a duty to help everyone else figure it out.

Nobody is doing a better job of that than Willison. I learned so much from reading this piece — I bet you will too.

Update: Anil Dash:

I think everyone who has an opinion, positive or negative, about LLMs, should read how @simonwillison has summed up what’s happened in the space this year. He’s the most credible, most independent, most honest, and most technically fluent person watching the space.

Couldn’t say it better myself.

There are metaphors, and then there are metaphors.

Happy New Year. Buckle up.

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Hartley Charlton, MacRumors:

Apple TV+ is set to be available to stream for free from Saturday, January 4 to Sunday, January 5, providing its full catalog with no subscription fee. Following a series of teasers, Apple today confirmed the free weekend on social media, building anticipation for new releases early in 2025 such as the second season of Severance. Simply open the Apple TV app to watch for free.

Bizarrely, the only places Apple announced this seems to be on X and Instagram. Not a word on Apple Newsroom, for example. Update: OK, it’s also posted on Apple’s dedicated press release site for TV+, which I heretofore didn’t know existed.

Apple TV+ has an abundance of great shows (but a relative dearth of good original movies, with Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon being the standout exception). I wouldn’t hesitate to argue that the average quality of an Apple TV+ original show is higher than that for any other streaming platform. It really is the new HBO. But for one weekend of free viewing I can easily name my two favorites, both of which I think will stand the test of time and long be remembered: Severance and Slow Horses.

Speaking of sponsorships, the Q1 schedule is filling up, but I’ve still got this week and next open. If you’ve got a product or service you think would be of interest to DF’s audience of people obsessed with high quality and good design, get in touch.

James Fallows, in a 2023 piece for The Atlantic, written when Carter entered hospice care:

Jimmy Carter survived to see many of his ambitions realized, including near eradication of the dreaded Guinea worm, which, unglamorous as it sounds, represents an increase in human well-being greater than most leaders have achieved. He survived to see his character, vision, and sincerity recognized, and to know that other ex-presidents will be judged by the standard he has set.

He was an unlucky president, and a lucky man.

We are lucky to have had him. Blessed.

Juli Clover, MacRumors:

An upcoming version of the Magic Mouse with voice control for AI would “make sense,” Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman said today, though he claimed that he has heard no rumors about the feature so far.

Alongside the voice-input mouse, it’d make just as much sense to bring back some of that see-through 1998 iMac aesthetic by switching MacBooks to transparent aluminum.

Fun and interesting list overall (via Kottke), but #7 caught my attention:

Walking speed on the streets of New York, Boston, and Philadelphia has increased 15% since 1979. (“Shifting Patterns of Social Interaction: Exploring the Social Life of Urban Spaces Through A.I.”)

Not sure what made the researchers pick those three cities, but in my experience they’re the only three cities in America where people walk at a reasonable clip.

(Sidenote: #1 on Hendricks’s list was an item claiming that Firefox and Chrome users tend to be happier and more satisfied employees than Internet Explorer or Safari users, because they’re the sort of non-conformist thinkers who install third-party web browsers rather than use the system default. As if the inclusion of “Internet Explorer” weren’t hint enough that one should be skeptical of this claim, the cited source is an article from 2016, and the study only applied to people with jobs as customer service agents. Chrome has 66 percent market share for desktop browsers today — pretty sure using it doesn’t make one a non-conformist.)

My thanks to Junjie for sponsoring last week at DF to promote Due, their excellent reminder app for the Mac, iPhone, and iPad. I first linked to Due back in 2010, writing this short post:

I’ve been trying this $3 app for a few days and digging it — a convenient, low-friction way to set short-term reminders and timers. Sort of like Pester but for iPhone. Focused and thoughtful design.

A lot of apps have come and gone since then. But Due has thrived. I never would have expected it when I penned the short blurb above, but here we are at the very end of 2024 and I’ve been relying upon Due for 14 years and counting. I started using it then and haven’t stopped. Due has long held a permanent position on my iPhone’s first home screen. And for several years now, Due has been available, with seamless iCloud syncing, on the Mac.

You might ask why use Due instead of Apple Reminders. For me the answer is simple. Due’s conception and presentation of “reminders” works for me and my way of thinking in a way that Apple Reminders does not. I have tons of to-do items in Reminders. But for a certain type of recurring and one-off tasks that I want to be reminded about at a certain time, they go in Due.

For example, our trash gets picked up on Monday and Thursday mornings. So I have recurring Due reminders to take out the trash every Sunday and Wednesday night. I don’t want these in my calendar. I just want them in Due, and Due makes sure I see notifications at 9:00pm every trash night. Due’s intuitive snoozing options make it easy to postpone one of these by a day during weeks when trash pickup is delayed by a holiday. I also keep my reminders related to Daring Fireball’s weekly sponsors in Due — posting the new sponsor’s ad at the start of the week, and writing my thank-you post at the end of the week — which reminders were quite meta this week.

It turns out, that brief blurb I wrote about Due 14 years ago was meaningful to the success of Due. Reading Junjie’s remembrance about that post made me sit up a bit straighter, I’ll admit. I’ll accept some small measure of credit for discovering Due back then, but Due is so good, so distinctively original and useful, that I firmly believe its success was inevitable. Go check it out.

The New York Times:

While his presidency was remembered more for its failures than for its successes, his post-presidency was seen by many as a model for future chief executives. Rather than vanish from view or focus on moneymaking, he established the Carter Center to promote peace, fight disease and combat social inequality. He transformed himself into a freelance diplomat traveling the globe, sometimes irritating his successors but earning the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.

Kagi founder and CEO Vlad Prelovac joins the show to talk about the business of web search, the thinking behind Kagi’s own amazing search engine, and their upstart WebKit-based browser Orion.

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Via Jason Snell (back in October), who points first to this thread on Mastodon where a few of us posted about our preferences for the fonts we use for writing, and then describes this fun “tournament” from Typogram that lets you pick your favorite monospaced coding font from 32 choices. One limitation is that the only options are free fonts — some of my favorite monospaced fonts aren’t free and thus aren’t included (e.g. Consolas, Berkeley Mono, or Apple’s SF Mono). Another limitation is that some of the fonts in the tournament just plain suck. But it’s really pretty fun.

It’s also a good thing I procrastinated on linking to this for two months — it’s improved greatly in the weeks since Snell linked to it. The example code is now JavaScript, not CSS, which is a much better baseline for choosing a programming font. And there are some better font choices now.

I highly recommend you disable showing the font names while you play, to avoid any bias toward fonts you already think you have an opinion about. But no matter how many times I play, I always get the same winner: Adobe’s Source Code Pro. My second favorite in this tournament is IBM Plex Mono. The most conspicuous omission: Intel One Mono.

Thrice a week, I pay for my son’s tuition. Once, I forgot, and the tutor had to ask for it days later. I felt terrible for making him ask. After putting it in Due, awkward moments like that never happened again.

If keeping promises, meeting deadlines, and showing up on time matter to you as much as they do to me, Due might be the app for you.

PS: It’s been 14 years since I first made Due. But my journey would have ended abruptly if not for a three-sentence review on Daring Fireball. If you were one of those readers who took a chance on Due, thank you.

My thanks to Mochi Development for sponsoring last week at DF to promote Jiiiii, their exquisitely well-crafted app for tracking anime. (Jiiiii — with five i’s — is the onomatopoeia for staring at something, commonly used in Japanese media.) With over 75 shows that aired this past season alone, keeping up with and discovering new anime can be hard, especially across several streaming services. Jiiiii makes that simple by giving you a single schedule to check as you await your favorite’s show’s next episode.

Unlike any other anime aggregation site, Jiiiii has a collection of beautiful native apps for iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV, and Vision Pro, making it the best way to keep up with anime on Apple devices. They even have a progressive web app in beta, that you can download on almost any other platform to get a similar experience.

The best part? No ads, no tracking, and complete privacy — all the benefits you’d expect from the indie husband-and-wife developers Dimitri and Linh Bouniol. (Dimitri streamed the entire development of Jiiiii to YouTube, and continues to do so every night.)

Catch up on anything you missed from the fall season, and get ready for the winter season’s new anime with Jiiiii, and never miss out on a show again.