And other revelations from day two of Meta's antitrust trial. PLUS: the OpenAI social network

New cookbook from Samin Nosrat called Good Things that includes “the things she most loves to cook for herself and for friends”. Nosrat is the author of the nearly ubiquitous Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Photographer Joshua Rozells on his photo of our increasingly crowded night skies: The light pollution caused by satellites is quickly becoming a growing problem for astronomers. In 2021, over 1700 spacecrafts and satellites were put into orbit. Light pollution caused by SpaceX’s Starlink satellites are the worst offenders because they are low Earth orbit satellites, and they travel in satellite trains. One can only assume the issue will exponentially increase in the next few years, with SpaceX a [more]

David Graeber (co-author of The Dawn of Everything): Are You An Anarchist? The Answer May Surprise You! “Anarchists are simply people who believe human beings are capable of behaving in a reasonable fashion without having to be forced to.”

“Drew Struzan is a legendary movie poster illustrator, the man behind all the posters we grew up with. He started with legendary titles like Blade Runner, The Thing, and Back to the Future, and continued with Indiana Jones and Star Wars.” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

This is a really interesting essay from Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor about the rise of end times fascism and the far right’s bet against the future. The governing ideology of the far right in our age of escalating disasters has become a monstrous, supremacist survivalism. It is terrifying in its wickedness, yes. But it also opens up powerful possibilities for resistance. To bet against the future on this scale – to bank on your bunker – is to betray, on the most basic level, our duties to one an [more]

Do Not Comply: A Lesson from the Last Three Months of Anti-Trans Attacks. “The cruelty lies in the ambiguity. These orders don’t explicitly bar specific conduct but deputize decision-makers to interpret them in ways that inflict the greatest harm…”

This is how everyone in Vermont drives in the winter. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

I Didn’t Think Things Would Get This Chaotic When We Elected President Donkey Kong. “But for all the talk from pundits about how we’d see a new side of Donkey Kong once he took office, well, not so much. Turns out we got exactly what we voted for.”

Harvard is refusing to comply with Trump’s demands related to his regime’s racist, xenophobic political agenda, including a threat to cut $9 billion in research funding. From the AP: Harvard President Alan Garber, in a letter to the Harvard community Monday, said the demands violated the university’s First Amendment rights and “exceeds the statutory limits of the government’s authority under Title VI,” which prohibits discrimination against students based on their race, color or national origin. [more]

Ars Technica is doing a three-part series on the history of the internet; here’s part one, which covers ARPANET, IMPs, TCP/IP, RFCs, DNS, CompuServe, etc. “It was the first time that autocomplete had ruined someone’s day.” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

More than four years after it was first filed, the government's case is only getting harder to prove

Samuel Axon, writing for Ars Technica: Some time ago, OpenAI added a feature called “Memory” that allowed a limited number of pieces of information to be retained and used for future responses. Users often had to specifically ask ChatGPT to remember something to trigger this, though it occasionally tried to guess at what it should remember, too. [...] Users could enable or disable this feature at will, and it was automatically off for specific chats where users chose the “Temporary Chat” option  [more]

Coffee has always been about bringing people together. For us, it started with a simple question over a late-night cup of decaf: why do coffee lovers who skip the caffeine have to skip the craft too? At Dekáf, we believe those who drink coffee purely for its flavor are the true connoisseurs. While other roasters treat decaf as a side project, we’ve made it our entire mission. We’re dedicated to creating exceptional decaffeinated coffee that stands toe-to-toe with the world’s finest caffeinated b [more]

In a meeting today, dictators Donald Trump & Nayib Bukele talked about building Salvadoran concentration camps for US citizens and defying a Supreme Court order to return Abrego Garcia from unlawful detention. “You gotta build about five more places.”

From Akela Lacy at The Intercept, Palestinian Student Leader Was Called In for Citizenship Interview — Then Arrested by ICE (archive): Mohsen K. Mahdawi arrived at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services office in Burlington, Vermont, on Monday. A Palestinian student at Columbia University, he hoped that, after 10 years in the U.S., he would pass the test to become a naturalized citizen. Instead, agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested him and began the process to de [more]

Filmmaker Ryan Coogler (Black Panther, Creed) is a big ol’ movie dork, and it’s endearing to watch him break down all the different types of film, aspect ratios, and projection options as he explains how many ways you can watch his latest movie, Sinners, when it comes out this week. Super informative too if you’ve always wondered about the different IMAX formats and just what the heck it means when someone you love gets excited about 70mm. Tags: film school · movies · Ryan Coogler · Sinners · vi [more]

Read to the end for a good chart

Why do AI company logos look like buttholes? “The fluidity and warmth of human-centered thinking through the use of circles is perhaps the most elegant way anyone has ever described making a logo that resembles an anus.”

Hey, it’s been awhile since we’ve done one of these. If you are out there looking for work, post a quick summary of what you do, what you’re looking for, and a link to your resume/portfolio/LinkedIn/contact info and maybe someone here will see it and want to hire you. Likewise, if you or your company/organization has job openings, post a brief description and a link to the opening(s). Full-time, freelance, remote-only, in-person, tech, non-tech, anything goes. Since comments can only be left by [more]

M. Gessen: “This is my radical proposal for universities: Act like universities, not like businesses. Spend your endowments. Accept more, not fewer students. Open up your campuses and [bring] education to communities. Create a base. Become a movement.”

Heather Cox Richardson on where we are right now in terms of what type of government we currently have: Here’s the thing: Once you give up the idea that we are all equal before the law and have the right to due process, you have given up the whole game. You have admitted the principle that some people have more rights than others. Once you have replaced the principle of equality before the law with the idea that some people have no rights, you have granted your approval to the idea of an authori [more]

Seth Godin: You can’t. That’s because toddlers don’t understand what an argument is and aren’t interesting in having one. Toddlers (which includes defensive bureaucrats, bullies, flat earthers, folks committed to a specific agenda and radio talk show hosts) may indicate that they’d like to have an argument, but they’re actually engaging in connection, noise, play acting or a chance to earn status. It can be fun to be in opposition, to harangue or even to use power to change someone’s position.   [more]

Letter from a high-ranking FBI official who recently resigned. “I took an oath to defend the Constitution. The unqualified leaders Donald Trump chose to lead the bureau act like they took an oath to Trump personally.”

I was chuffed to see that KDO’s own Edith Zimmerman has a cartoon in the New Yorker today! Go Edith! 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

George Monbiot: Rightwing populists will keep winning until we grasp this truth about human nature. “Economic inequality breeds resentment and a desire to get even. That’s what fuels support for even incompetent regimes.”

My thanks to WorkOS for sponsoring last week at DF. Modern authentication should be seamless and secure. WorkOS makes it easy to integrate features like MFA, SSO, and RBAC. Whether you’re replacing passwords, stopping fraud, or adding enterprise auth, WorkOS can help you build frictionless auth that scales. New features they launched just last month include: WorkOS Connect — “Sign in with [Your App]” WorkOS Vault — Encryption Key Management (EKM) and Bring-Your-Own-Key (BYOK) AuthKit Integration [more]

Bill Maher personifies the difference between a liberal (which he is) and a leftist (which he isn’t). But he’s been a stridently vocal critic of Trump since long before Trump even ran for president. Maher was the first person on television to correctly predict that Trump, if he lost the 2020 election, would attempt to remain in office. Maher and Trump, however, are mutual friends with Kid Rock, and Rock arranged for Trump to invite Maher to the White House for a private dinner. UFC chief and Met [more]

I am catching up on what happened in season one of The Last of Us by watching and reading recaps. Season 2 starts tonight on HBO & Max at 9pm ET. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Crackerjack essay by Chuck Wendig: Maybe it’s like turbulence on an airplane, you think. Just a bumpy unpleasant awful experience you gotta get through. But when turbulence hits it’s not because the pilot is a guy who doesn’t “know planes,” when turbulence hits they don’t disappear the ninth row people out the airlock because they “look different” and are “probably causing the problem.” Planes don’t have airlocks, do they? Whatever. My brain is spray cheese.  ★

Vanity Fair published an excerpt from Chris Whipple’s new book on the final years of Joe Biden’s presidency, under the headline “Did Aides Cover Up His Mental State — or Was It Group Delusion?” (News+ link): The president’s wobbly state should have been a flashing warning light. At his first meeting with Biden, Ron Klain, his former White House chief of staff, who was in charge of debate prep, was startled. He’d never seen Biden so exhausted and out of it. He seemed unaware of what was happening [more]

Jamelle Bouie, writing at The New York Times (gift link): There is a hypothetical president with a hypothetically similar agenda who could answer these questions. This actual president cannot. He did not reason himself into his preoccupation with tariffs and can neither reason nor speak coherently about them. There is no grand plan or strategic vision, no matter what his advisers claim — only the impulsive actions of a mad king, untethered from any responsibility to the nation or its people. For [more]

New Study Finds Average American Stands No Chance Against What’s Coming. “The typical American is toast.”

Roundup 04/13/2025

Warren Buffett’s annual shareholders letters are always a must-read. The honesty, clarity, and striking humility of his prose stands out in a world where corporate communications — from companies of any size — tend to be bland and obfuscating. This year’s letter, published back in February, is no exception. Two sections stood out to me. First, in a section titled “Mistakes — Yes, We Make Them at Berkshire”: Sometimes I’ve made mistakes in assessing the future economics of a business I’ve purchas [more]

Auzinea Bacon, CNN: Electronics imported to the United States will be exempt from President Donald Trump’s reciprocal tariffs, according to a US Customs and Border Protection notice posted late Friday. Smartphones, computer monitors and various electronic parts are among the exempted products. The exemption applies to products entering the United States or removed from warehouses as early as April 5, according to the notice. The move comes after the Trump administration imposed a minimum tariff [more]

Reuters: China’s Anker, one of Amazon’s largest sellers offering products from power banks to phone cases, has raised prices on a fifth of its products on the U.S. platform since Thursday, in a sign that tariffs on Chinese goods are being passed on to U.S. shoppers. Some 127 Anker products have seen an average increase of 18% since Thursday last week, with the majority of those occurring after Monday, April 7, when U.S. President Donald Trump added an extra 50% import duty on Chinese goods, acco [more]

Financial Times reporter John Burn-Murdoch has a summary on Bluesky of his co-bylined report for the Financial Times: Visitors from western Europe who stayed at least one night in the US fell by 17 per cent in March from a year ago, according to the International Trade Administration. Travel from some countries — including Ireland, Norway and Germany — fell by more than 20 per cent, an FT analysis of ITA data showed. The trend poses a threat to the US tourism industry, which accounts for 2.5 per [more]

Reuters: “The U.S. side’s imposition of excessively high tariffs on China seriously violates international economic and trade rules, runs counter to basic economic principles and common sense, and is simply an act of unilateral bullying and coercion,” China’s Finance Ministry said in a statement. [...] “Even if the U.S. continues to impose even higher tariffs, it would no longer have any economic significance and would go down as a joke in the history of world economics,” the Finance Ministry’s [more]

The strategy behind Liberation Day

Read to the end for a good birdwatching thread

From Meta to Nvidia, tech CEOs are paying the president to get the outcomes they want — and it's working

Blockbuster report by Wayne Ma for The Information (paywalled and pricey, alas): But an equally important factor was the conflicting personalities within Apple, according to multiple people who worked in the AI and software engineering groups. More than half a dozen former Apple employees who worked in the AI and machine-learning group led by Giannandrea — known as AI/ML for short — told The Information that poor leadership is to blame for its problems with execution. They singled out Walker as [more]

The Tariff Saga Is About One Thing. “Trump’s desire to dominate others is the driving psychological force of his administration.”

Cy Kuckenbaker compressed five hours of landing planes into 30 seconds of video. I love this. A great example of time merge media. (via colossal, which has been killing it lately) [This is a vintage post originally from Dec 2012.] Tags: Cy Kuckenbaker · timeless posts · video

Ben Thompson: The problem with these tariffs is that their scale and indiscriminate nature will have the effect of destroying demand and destroying the capability to develop alternative supply. I suppose if the only goal is to hurt China then shooting yourself in the foot, such that you no longer need to buy shoes for stumps, is a strategy you could choose, but that does nothing to help with what should be the primary motivation: shoring up the U.S. national security base. Those national securit [more]

Chance Miller, writing at 9to5Mac: Ahead of that, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said today that Trump firmly believes that Apple can move iPhone manufacturing to the United States. In response to a question from Maggie Haberman of The New York Times about the types of jobs Trump hopes to create in the U.S. with these tariffs, Leavitt said: “The president wants to increase manufacturing jobs here in the United States of America, but he’s also looking at advanced technologies. He’s [more]

All the headlines are following Trump’s messaging of a “pause”, but the fact is that goods imported from practically every country in the world are taxed at 10% and Chinese goods at 125%. These damaging tariffs are all Trump’s doing. Nothing is “fixed”.

Clean energy powered 40% of global electricity in 2024, report finds. “The milestone was powered by a boom in solar power capacity, which has doubled in the last three years.”

What It Feels Like, Right Now. “It’s hard to focus. It’s hard to focus on the things in front of me, that I need to do. It’s hard to focus on the news, because it’s not just one thing, it’s a hundred things, news like fire ants…” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Jen Simmons, writing on the WebKit blog, “Better Typography With text-wrap pretty”: For over 30 years, the web had only one technique for determining where to wrap text. The browser starts with the first line of text, and lays out each word or syllable, one after another until it runs out of room. As soon as it has no more space to fit another word/syllable, it wraps to the next line (if wrapping is allowed). Then it starts on the next line, fitting all the content it can… then when it runs out [more]

We Should All Be Very, Very Afraid. “The administration could create its own gulags with no more judicial review than existed when Stalin did the same thing in the Soviet Union.”

If You Heard What I Heard is a collection of Holocaust stories as told by survivors to their grandchildren. “Our generation is the last to ever hear our grandparents’ stories firsthand, in the same room, over the course of decades, directly from them.” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

From the NYT’s Overlooked obituary series: Katharine McCormick, Force Behind the Birth Control Pill. In the 20s, she smuggled 1000 diaphragms into the US in her luggage and later funded the development of the birth control pill. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

This sounds like one of those puzzles job interviewers often ask, but there’s a practical relevance at the moment: What’s a ballpark estimate for how many iPhones Apple might have hustled to ship into the US on those five freight planes ahead of the new tariffs? Ryan Jones tackled it in a post on X: A whopping 12 days of sales. At most. Math: I like Jones’s ballpark math here. Let’s not worry about volume, just weight. If we’re wrong about the volume, it can only mean fewer new-in-box iPhones c [more]

The List Keepers, on the informal efforts to keep track of the toll of AIDS in the theater industry. “Sometime around 1982, McAssey had opened a pocket-size spiral-bound diary and written LOST FRIENDS at the top of a page.” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Former Substack creators say they’re earning more on new platforms. “Paying someone $100,000 a year to host your blog. Come on buddy. I said I hate being a businessman, but even I know that’s fucking stupid.”

ICE director’s dream: “Squads of trucks rounding up immigrants for deportation the same way that Amazon trucks crisscross American cities delivering packages […] like (Amazon) Prime, but with human beings.” This is pure evil.

President Trump, in a post on Truth Social, which is apparently how the world’s financial markets now run: Based on the lack of respect that China has shown to the World’s Markets, I am hereby raising the Tariff charged to China by the United States of America to 125%, effective immediately. At some point, hopefully in the near future, China will realize that the days of ripping off the U.S.A., and other Countries, is no longer sustainable or acceptable. Conversely, and based on the fact that mo [more]

Read to the end for a very uplifting post

Ryan Broderick on how, with the trade war that Trump’s tariffs has unleashed, we are speedrunning Brexit and other hyper-inflationary financial crises (thread) and Americans may soon find out what happens when US dollars don’t buy anything. So from my uniquely weird perspective after living in the UK through Brexit, being in India during Modi’s demonetization, and living in Brazil when the real tanked during the Bolsonaro administration, I can confidently say that Americans do not and can not un [more]

From Edith Zimmerman: Vampire Brand Crossovers. Like Nosferatuthbrush from Orlok-B. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

"Llama con" just got a whole new meeting

Ok so I’ve watched the trailer for the new Wes Anderson movie, The Phoenician Scheme, a couple of times and I still don’t know what it’s actually about? But from the looks of things, it is more of the same for people who like that sort of thing, which is lucky for me. Also, Michael Cera might be the most Wes Anderson-coded actor that’s never before been in a Wes Anderson movie. Tags: movies · The Phoenician Scheme · trailers · video · Wes Anderson 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Modern authentication should be seamless and secure. WorkOS makes it easy to integrate features like MFA, SSO, and RBAC. Whether you’re replacing passwords, stopping fraud, or adding enterprise auth, WorkOS can help you build frictionless auth that scales. Future-proof your authentication stack with the identity layer trusted by OpenAI, Cursor, Perplexity, and Vercel. Upgrade your auth today.  ★

Which types of people aren’t big fans of “impartial” news? People who don’t have power. “The poor, those with less education, young people, and women are less likely to prefer ‘impartial’ news sources over those that align with their own views.”

Chance Miller, writing for 9to5Mac: According to senior Indian officials cited in the report, Apple flew five planes full of iPhones and other products from India and China “in just three days during the final week of March.” “Factories in India and China and other key locations had been shipping products to the US in anticipation of the higher tariffs,” one source to The Times of India said. Apple currently assembles the entire iPhone 15 and iPhone 16 lineups in India as well as China. A 10% ba [more]

Speaking of the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote, animator Chuck Jones and his team were said to follow these simple rules when creating the cartoons: The Road Runner cannot harm the Coyote except by going “meep, meep.” No outside force can harm the Coyote — only his own ineptitude or the failure of Acme products. Trains and trucks were the exception from time to time. The Coyote could stop anytime — if he were not a fanatic. No dialogue ever, except “meep, meep” and yowling in pain. The [more]

Can I Teach the First Amendment If I Only Have a Green Card? “[Trump’s chilling actions] also make it difficult to work out how to teach cases that boldly proclaim this country is committed to a vision of free speech that, right now, feels very far away.”

For The Guardian, the film critic Guy Lodge has complied a list of 25 films that “shed light on the US under Trump”. From the introduction by filmmaker Alex Gibney: This is a dire moment in the US. It’s a moment where there’s an opportunity for people with a lot of money to rip apart all of the guidelines enacted by the Roosevelt administration, way back in the day, to guard against the brutality of unfettered capitalism. Capitalists like to have all the power that they want, whenever they want [more]

Happy 10th birthday to Lit Hub, a site I’ve been reading and linking to more frequently over the past few months. “I believe deeply in making our small corner of the internet a better place, publishing work that elevates, interrogates, and inspires…” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

In a recent episode of The Simpsons, Bart becomes a DJ and KDO favorites The Hood Internet wrote the music and did all of Bart’s mixes. They also made a ending credits remix of some of the most memorable Simpsons songs, including See My Vest, Mr. Plow, Do the Bartman, We Do (the Stonecutters song), Dr. Zaius, and The Monorail Song: (via @unlikelywords.bsky.social) Tags: music · remix · The Hood Internet · The Simpsons · TV 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

How to Enter the US With Your Digital Privacy Intact. “Crossing into the United States has become increasingly dangerous for digital privacy. Here are a few steps you can take to minimize the risk of Customs and Border Protection accessing your data.” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

On the Episode That Changed Ira Glass’s This American Life Forever. Or, On the Importance of Fact-Checking. “There was only one problem. In almost every salient detail, the story was a fabrication.” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Torpedo Bats and the Physics of the Sweet Spot. They invented a new legal-for-now baseball bat shaped like “an elongated bowling pin” and the Yankees are using it? 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Seemingly caught gaming a key benchmark, and defending allegations it taught to the test, Meta sees a rocky launch for its latest AI model

Thomas Zimmer: “If you are feeling overwhelmed by the stupidity, the chaos, the vile fanaticism, the immeasurable damage and suffering, the specter of global turmoil, just know that I am feeling that too. Because this is just an insane situation.”

Anne Applebaum writes about how Trump, Bannon and other MAGA conservatives love what Hungarian Prime minister Viktor Orbán is going to his country. Once widely perceived to be the wealthiest country in Central Europe (“the happiest barrack in the socialist camp,” as it was known during the Cold War), and later the Central European country that foreign investors liked most, Hungary is now one of the poorest countries, and possibly the poorest, in the European Union. Industrial production is falli [more]

Three key points on how economic crises can lead to the breakdown of authoritarian regimes. “1. Regimes break down when elites turn on each other about how to deal with an economic crisis.” It becomes a matter of “who needs to avoid bankruptcy”.

Rebecca Solnit on the importance of Preaching to The Choir in activism. “‘Have we thought critically about why we agree?’ It’s a call to go deeper, to question yourself.” It’s also good to hear “the great stories more than once”.

“If we want to bring the world back from the brink, we have to deal with him.” Quick quiz: is that a quote from the latest Mission Impossible movie trailer or about the current inhabitant of the White House? (Also, Mr. Milchick!)

Move over Ford Edsel, Pontiac Aztek, and AMC Pacer, there’s a new automotive flop in town: the dumpster-forward Tesla Cybertruck. After a little over a year on the market, sales of the 6,600-pound vehicle, priced from $82,000, are laughably below what Musk predicted. Its lousy reputation for quality — with eight recalls in the past 13 months, the latest for body panels that fall off — and polarizing look made it a punchline for comedians. Unlike past auto flops that just looked ridiculous or sol [more]

An editorial in Nature: “A brain drain would impoverish the United States and diminish world science”.

Read to the end for a very stompy cat

America Is Watching the Rise of a Dual State. “For most people, the courts will continue to operate as usual — until they don’t.” Great piece on how autocrats both use and flout the law to suppress & control while keeping capitalism humming along.

Silence is Collaboration: Academics Must Speak Out Against Fascism. “We will call these arrests what they are: abductions by ICE cowards in plainclothes and facemasks.”

I’m a Free-Thinking Centrist with Only Right-Wing Ideas. “I voted for Trump, but I respect Democrats like John Fetterman who are willing to reach across the aisle to promote ethnic cleansing.”

Travel maven Rick Steves made a great hour-long documentary about the history of fascism in Europe. “We’ll see the horrific consequences: genocide and total war.”

My sincere thanks to The Ole Independence Hall Hooligans for sponsoring this past week at DF to promote democracy. That’s it. A real sponsorship, real money, raised by a group of readers who simply wanted the ad space on DF to promote, as they described it, “the enduring and aspirational project that is democracy.” In their sponsored RSS entry to start the week, they quoted the preamble to the US Constitution. I’ll go a decade earlier, and quote from the Declaration of Independence: The history [more]

David Remnick, in a fine short piece for The New Yorker on Signalgate: This is an Administration that does not have to slip on a Signal banana peel to reveal its deepest-held prejudices and its painful incapacities. You get the sense that we would learn little if we were privy to a twenty-four-hour-a-day live stream of its every private utterance. Part of what was so appalling about Trump and Vance’s recent meeting with Volodymyr Zelensky was not just their penchant for channelling the world vie [more]

This Is the Holocaust Story I Said I Wouldn’t Write by Taffy Brodesser-Akner defies easy explanation but is very much worth reading. “Does a life have to be meaningful? Can’t it just be a life?”

On Saturday, millions of Americans flooded the streets of cities, small towns, and every other sized municipality in the nation to protest the illegal and damaging actions of the Trump regime. These photos published by a number of media outlets show the scale, enthusiasm, and creativity of these peaceful protests, in the US and around the world. Photos: Nationwide Protests Against Trump and Musk (The Atlantic). Anti-Trump protests hit cities worldwide — in pictures (The Guardian). Photos: See [more]

A rare interview with Tracy Chapman. “But I grew up across the street from a public library, and it was the only place my mom would let me go on my own. It was my second home, and I read everything that I could get.” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Roundup 04/06/2025

Terrific photos and summary coverage from The Guardian. Additional coverage from The New York Times, Washington Post, and CNN. Update: The Atlantic has a great collection of photos from dozens of cities. There’s something so bizarrely asymmetrical about Trump’s political support. We saw large scale protests like today’s starting in 2017 too, and in this 2.0 administration, they’re only going to get bigger. Today’s protests were coast-to-coast, in cities large and small. Hundreds of thousands — c [more]

Joanna Stern, Adrienne Tong, and Nicole Nguyen, writing for The Wall Street Journal (News+): Take a look at this iPhone 16 Pro. Your cost, for the 256GB version, is $1,100. The cost of all the hardware inside — aka the bill of materials — was about $550 to Apple when the phone was introduced, says Wayne Lam, research analyst at TechInsights, which breaks down major products. Throw in assembly and testing and Apple’s cost rises to around $580. Even when you account for Apple’s advertising budget [more]

Dan Moren, writing at Six Colors: In his piece, Gruber particularly calls out the trashcan Mac Pro sticking at $2999 throughout its existence, but I think an even more striking example is the iMac. Introduced in 1998 at a base price of $1299, today’s infinitely more powerful iMac M4 starts at … $1299. Granted, with inflation, those prices would be a little different. In researching the details, I came across this great piece from PerfectRec charting the iMac’s price history over the years, inclu [more]

Barbara Moens and Henry Foy, reporting from Brussels for the Financial Times last Friday, March 28: The EU is set to impose minimal fines on Apple and Facebook owner Meta next week under its Digital Markets Act, as Brussels seeks to avoid escalating tensions with US President Donald Trump. According to people familiar with the decisions, the iPhone maker is expected to be fined and ordered to revise its App Store rules, following an investigation into whether they prevent app developers from sen [more]

I am still stinge watching my way through the second season of Strange New Worlds, but the third season of the show premieres sometime this summer, so I’d better finish it up before then. Anyway, I love this show and crew and the trailer looks appropriately kooky and wacky so let’s goooo! Tags: Star Trek · trailers · TV · video 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Epic CEO Tim Sweeney, yesterday: Thanks to Microsoft for 50 years of being awesome to developers! Some years the software was great. Some years the software sucked. Every year the company and its ecosystem has stood with and supported developers. I pity the man who doesn’t have enough fingers to count the number of game stores available on Xbox.  ★

Tom Warren, reporting for The Verge: Microsoft held a special 50th anniversary event at its headquarters earlier today. During Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman’s presentation, a Microsoft employee interrupted the event to protest the use of Microsoft’s technologies in Israel’s war against Hamas. A second employee interrupted the event later on, while CEO Satya Nadella, co-founder Bill Gates, and former CEO Steve Ballmer were discussing 50 years of Microsoft. The only opinionated public takes I’ [more]

Susan Glasser, writing for The New Yorker, “Donald Trump’s Ego Melts the Global Economy”: In this new political moment of the unthinkable made manifest, the sheer power rush for Trump should also not be underestimated. Imagine his joy as he sat down to sign an executive order decreeing the new tariffs on the basis of sweeping powers he may or may not legally possess to declare a “national economic emergency” — here was Trump transforming the world with a single flourish of his Sharpie pen. “It’s [more]

CNBC: President Donald Trump on Friday extended a deadline requiring China-based ByteDance to sell the U.S. operations of TikTok or face an effective ban in the country, marking the second time he has taken such action. Trump, on Truth Social, which is by far the most popular social network in the world: My Administration has been working very hard on a Deal to SAVE TIKTOK, and we have made tremendous progress. The Deal requires more work to ensure all necessary approvals are signed, which is wh [more]

From that same Reuters report by Akash Sriram that I just wrote about, speculating that iPhone prices might rise dramatically under Trump’s tariffs: However, other analysts noted that iPhone sales have been floundering in the company’s major markets, as Apple Intelligence, a suite of features that helps summarize notifications, rewrite emails and give users access to ChatGPT, has failed to enthuse buyers. Merriam-Webster defines flounder thus: : to struggle to move or obtain footing : thrash abo [more]

Akash Sriram, reporting for Reuters under the headline “A $2,300 Apple iPhone? Trump Tariffs Could Make That Happen.”: Most iPhones are still made in China, which was hit with a 54% tariff. If those levies persist, Apple has a tough choice: absorb the extra expense or pass it on to customers. Shares of the company closed down 9.3% on Thursday, hitting their worst day since March 2020. Apple shares dropped another 7.3% percent today. Apple alone has lost 16.6% of its value in the last 48 hours; t [more]

Mike Isaac, writing for The New York Times: Apple, Dell, Oracle — which rely on hardware and global supply chains that are in the direct line of fire from tariffs — saw their shares go into free-fall. But there was another big tech company whose stock took a pummeling even though its core business has little to do with hardware: Meta. [...] The effect of tariffs on Meta’s ad business is simple. Many of its small and medium-sized advertisers are from all across the world. President Trump’s tariff [more]

Emma Roth, The Verge: Nintendo is pushing back preorders for the Switch 2 due to concerns about Donald Trump’s newly announced tariffs. According to a statement sent to The Verge by Eddie Garcia on behalf of Nintendo, it says preorders will no longer begin on April 9th: Pre-orders for Nintendo Switch 2 in the U.S. will not start April 9, 2025 in order to assess the potential impact of tariffs and evolving market conditions. Nintendo will update timing at a later date. The launch date of June 5, [more]

Allison McDaniel, writing for 9to5Mac back in 2022: Apple Cash is a virtual debit card where you can send and receive money through iMessage. Stored in your Wallet, you can make secure and contactless payments with Apple Pay from your iPhone or Apple Watch. It’s also a way to receive daily cash back for those who use Apple Card. Previously a Discover card, your Apple Cash card is now Visa. Spotted by user @Kanjo on Twitter, it’s easy to notice the card has a visible Visa logo in the bottom right [more]

I observed yesterday that, in general, Visa and Mastercard credit cards are both accepted at the same locations. The most notable exception is Costco, which, as part of the deal to make its own credit card a Visa (after long partnering with Amex), only accepts Visa credit cards at its physical retail locations and gas stations. They accept “most PIN-based debit/ATM cards”, but for credit, only Visa. Online, for reasons I don’t understand, Costco accepts Mastercard too (which they incorrectly sty [more]

Here's your Garbage Intelligence for March 2025

Bill Gates, commemorating Microsoft’s 50th anniversary: The story of how Microsoft came to be begins with, of all things, a magazine. The January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics featured an Altair 8800 on the cover. The Altair 8800, created by a small electronics company called MITS, was a groundbreaking personal computer kit that promised to bring computing power to hobbyists. When Paul and I saw that cover, we knew two things: the PC revolution was imminent, and we wanted to get in on the gr [more]

Wonderfully detailed write-up of a perfect prop from Make3: Repurposed Nagra Knobs & Switches — To ground the device in a tangible, vintage aesthetic, we salvaged original knobs and switches from a 1990s Nagra IV-D recorder, seamlessly integrating them into our design. These components not only provided an authentic look and feel but also remained fully functional, with: A power switch for system activation. A reading on/off switch to engage or disable the Woe display. A manual override switch t [more]

Jason Snell, last month: The new M4 MacBook Air is the Mac most people should buy. [...] That’s why perhaps the most important change in the M4 MacBook Air is its base configuration, which starts at $999. When Apple introduced a winning new flat-with-rounded-corners Air design in 2022, it had to keep selling older models in order to get down under a thousand dollars. Three years later, Apple is finally able to sell a brand-new Air — with a generous 16GB of unified memory — at that important pric [more]

Trump is holding out ByteDance's app as a bargaining chip. Will China take the bait?

Following up on the previous item, here’s a WSJ report from October on Visa’s dominant position in the payments industry: Visa, based in San Francisco, has built its network over more than 60 years — going back to clunky manual credit-card readers and carbon-paper copies of receipts. It accounts for around 60% of the total dollar amount of U.S. debit-card purchases and about 50% of U.S. credit-card purchases, according to the Nilson Report, a trade publication. Its closest competitor, Mastercard [more]

AnnaMaria Andriotis, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (News+ link): The Apple card is up for grabs because Goldman Sachs, the bank behind it, is getting out of the consumer lending world. For months, big banks including JPMorgan Chase and Synchrony Financial have been vying to take over as issuer. What hasn’t been known is the equally fierce fight playing out between the networks to win Apple, with Visa and American Express trying to unseat Mastercard, according to people familiar with the [more]

Mike Masnick has a great piece at TechDirt running down just how stupid everything about Trump’s tariff trade war is: Whoever on the Council of Economic Advisers used this formula should turn in their econ degree, because this is not how anything works. Even if they then go on to publish another version of the formula that looks all sophisticated and shit. Brendan Duke, on X, shows that the fancier version of their formula — which is fancy in the way that Vertu phones are “fancy” — is even stupi [more]

The Economist: On economics Mr Trump’s assertions are flat-out nonsense. The president says tariffs are needed to close America’s trade deficit, which he sees as a transfer of wealth to foreigners. Yet as any of the president’s economists could have told him, this overall deficit arises because Americans choose to save less than their country invests — and, crucially, this long-running reality has not stopped its economy from outpacing the rest of the g7 for over three decades. There is no reaso [more]

CNBC: Markets plunged the day after President Donald Trump imposed a far-reaching “reciprocal tariff” policy, including a 10% baseline tariff on almost every country on earth. The plan slaps much steeper tariff rates on many countries, including 34% on China, 20% on the European Union, 46% on Vietnam and 32% on Taiwan. Economists and U.S. trade partners are raising questions about how the White House calculated the tariff rates it claimed other countries “charge” the United States. Apple, in par [more]

Read to the end for marmot lying still experience like washing a carpet

A Read Max re-run

Scrapers caused the online encyclopedia's bandwidth to increase by 50 percent last year — and its plan to fight back may not be enough

A new book offers the most thorough explanation to date. Would it have mattered if we knew at the time?

Jon Brodkin, reporting for Ars Technica, “France Fines Apple €150M for “Excessive” Pop-Ups That Let Users Reject Tracking”: France’s competition regulator fined Apple €150 million, saying the iPhone maker went overboard in its implementation of pop-up messages that let users consent to or reject tracking that third-party applications use for targeted advertising. The App Tracking Transparency (ATT) framework used by Apple on iPhones and iPads since 2021 makes the use of third-party applications [more]

Read to the end for Nerpa

With season 2 of Severance complete (with a remarkable bang), Apple TV+ has slid right into a new prestige series, The Studio, starring (and co-created by) Seth Rogen as the newly-appointed chief of the fictional and dysfunctional Continental Studios in Hollywood. Two episodes in (out of 10 for the debut season), and it is fucking amazing. So far it feels a bit like a cross between Entourage, The Larry Sanders Show, Boogie Nights, and maybe a touch of Curb Your Enthusiasm. But the biggest influe [more]

Roundup 03/30/2025

Fiat Ghibli slop--pereat mundus

Read to the end for a post about British people

Exclusive data from Anthropic about Claude usage finds that AI is both automating and augmenting human labor — and people are increasingly using it to educate themselves

Sam and Max talk Signal group chats and the Abundance Agenda

Back in 2017, the iPhone X was announced alongside the iPhones 8 and 8 Plus in mid-September. The iPhones 8 shipped that month, and I published a review of the iPhones 8 on September 19. The iPhone X, though, wasn’t available to order until October 27, and didn’t start shipping to customers until November 3. It was an unusual iPhone release cycle that year, to say the least. Initial reviews of the much-anticipated iPhone X appeared on October 31, but I’d only had the phone for 24 hours when the [more]

Read to the end for The Curse!

A parable about responsibility in the AI age

New research from OpenAI shows that heavy chatbot usage is correlated with loneliness and reduced socialization. Will AI companies learn from social networks' mistakes?

Read to the end for a good thread about romantic aunts

Roundup 03/22/2025

A new flavor of Twitter I.Q. discourse

Read to the end for a good loaf edit

Sam Biddle talks A.G.I., surveillance, and Facebook

Read to the end for the perfect date

Tech platforms got a rare opportunity to present President Trump with a wishlist — and they're using DeepSeek's success to push for controversial policies

New data from Adobe offers evidence for a big shift away from traditional search engines. Will the internet's vast public commons survive?

Read to the end for a good oil painting

A terrific new crime thriller and gnarly kung-fu movies: Roundup 05/14/2024

Plus: More A.G.I. talk!

Read to the end for McLovin trying Taco Bell for the first time

Crowdsourced moderation is better than nothing — but how much better remains an open question

Read to the end for a powerful audiovisual experience

One has been banned by the federal government and awaits a forced sale. The other keeps shipping

Read to the end for a good post about pasta

Favorite PKD, corporate-espionage screwball comedy: Roundup 03/10/2025

Here's your Garbage Intelligence for February 2025

Against "A.G.I."

Read to the end for a very rare Vance

Read to the end for a truly incredible male living space

A charming post-revolutionary wizard fantasy, some Gene Hackman faves, and songs I love: Roundup 03/02/25

Read to the end for a good post

The greatest performance in the greatest '90s blockbuster

A podcast with Henry Farrell

An elegiac spy novel, a gnarly one-take action movie, and four tracks I'm listening to.

Plus, how should Democrats think about crypto?

Three picture books my son loves, an underseen Le Carré adaptation, and four tracks I love

Welcome to 2025. The vibes are a little heavy, so, I’m trying very hard to focus on the things I can control — and yes, that includes remembering to share things that delight me like the latest #new snacks and cereals I find at the grocery store!! Yeah. It’s an age-old, very-odd Cabel tradition. This time, […]

This summer, a new video game came out that changed the way we think about comedy in games, becoming an instant smash hit in the process. That’s right, I’m talking about Thank Goodness You’re Here! from Coal Supper. Ok, yeah, sure, I work for Panic and we published the game, so I was contractually required […]

In January, I was invited to GDC, the Game Developers Conference, to give a talk about Playdate. That talk — “The Playdate Story: What Was it Like to Make Handheld Video Game System Hardware?” — has been made available free for all to view. Now, it’s been 10 years since my last talk at XOXO here […]

Here’s a quick and cautionary tale. This eBay auction, spotted by Eric Vitiello, immediately caught my eye: Wow. Someone was selling Apple Employee #10’s employee badge?! What an incredible piece of Apple history! Sure, it’s not Steve Jobs’ badge (despite the auction title), but there are only so many of these in the world — especially […]

My goal was to preserve some never-before-heard recordings of an incredible Dixieland jazz band made up of mostly Disney employees, the Firehouse Five Plus Two. But along the way, I accidentally discovered an incredible lost song that was cut from Walt Disney’s Cinderella. And you’re about to hear it too. Let’s go. Firehouse Five Plus […]