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Katie Robinson, reporting for The New York Times:

After President-elect Donald J. Trump announced a cascade of
cabinet picks last month, the editorial board of The Los Angeles
Times decided it would weigh in. One writer prepared an editorial
arguing that the Senate should follow its traditional process for
confirming nominees, particularly given the board’s concerns about
some of his picks, and ignore Mr. Trump’s call for so-called
recess appointments.

The paper’s owner, the billionaire medical entrepreneur Dr.
Patrick Soon-Shiong, had other ideas.

Hours before the editorial was set to be sent to the printer
for the next day’s newspaper, Dr. Soon-Shiong told the
opinion department’s leaders that the editorial could not be
published unless the paper also published an editorial with
an opposing view.

Baffled by his order and with the print deadline approaching,
editors removed the editorial, headlined “Donald Trump’s cabinet
choices are not normal. The Senate’s confirmation process should
be.” It never ran.

I’m not going to keep pointing to the ways Soon-Shiong is debasing the once-great LA Times. Until and if he sells it, which I don’t expect him to do, it’s over. What the LA Times was is gone. That sounds like hyperbole but it’s the obvious truth. One jackass columnist or even a fabulist reporter won’t sink an entire newspaper’s credibility. The Judith Miller reporting on “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq was a disaster for the New York Times 20 years ago, but while that saga did lasting damage to the NYT’s credibility, it didn’t sink the ship. But an owner like Soon-Shiong can sink the ship. The LA Times isn’t really a newspaper anymore — it’s a vanity rag.

I’m just fantasizing here, but someone with money should consider sweeping into Los Angeles and setting up a rival publication, and poaching all the talent from the Times. I’d have suggested Jeff Bezos until recently, but, well, not anymore. Off the top of my head: Marc Benioff (who now owns Time magazine) or Laurene Powell Jobs (whose Emerson Collective is the majority owner of The Atlantic), perhaps?

The newspaper business, alas, isn’t what it used to be. When it was thriving, local competition would have already been in place. Even small cities had at least two rival papers. Now, New York might be the only city in America left with any true competition between newspapers.

 ★ 

Katie Robinson, reporting for The New York Times:

After President-elect Donald J. Trump announced a cascade of
cabinet picks last month, the editorial board of The Los Angeles
Times decided it would weigh in. One writer prepared an editorial
arguing that the Senate should follow its traditional process for
confirming nominees, particularly given the board’s concerns about
some of his picks, and ignore Mr. Trump’s call for so-called
recess appointments.

The paper’s owner, the billionaire medical entrepreneur Dr.
Patrick Soon-Shiong, had other ideas.

Hours before the editorial was set to be sent to the printer
for the next day’s newspaper, Dr. Soon-Shiong told the
opinion department’s leaders that the editorial could not be
published unless the paper also published an editorial with
an opposing view.

Baffled by his order and with the print deadline approaching,
editors removed the editorial, headlined “Donald Trump’s cabinet
choices are not normal. The Senate’s confirmation process should
be.” It never ran.

I’m not going to keep pointing to the ways Soon-Shiong is debasing the once-great LA Times. Until and if he sells it, which I don’t expect him to do, it’s over. What the LA Times was is gone. That sounds like hyperbole but it’s the obvious truth. One jackass columnist or even a fabulist reporter won’t sink an entire newspaper’s credibility. The Judith Miller reporting on “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq was a disaster for the New York Times 20 years ago, but while that saga did lasting damage to the NYT’s credibility, it didn’t sink the ship. But an owner like Soon-Shiong can sink the ship. The LA Times isn’t really a newspaper anymore — it’s a vanity rag.

I’m just fantasizing here, but someone with money should consider sweeping into Los Angeles and setting up a rival publication, and poaching all the talent from the Times. I’d have suggested Jeff Bezos until recently, but, well, not anymore. Off the top of my head: Marc Benioff (who now owns Time magazine) or Laurene Powell Jobs (whose Emerson Collective is the majority owner of The Atlantic), perhaps?

The newspaper business, alas, isn’t what it used to be. When it was thriving, local competition would have already been in place. Even small cities had at least two rival papers. Now, New York might be the only city in America left with any true competition between newspapers.

Read More 

Ev Williams, writing the backstory of, and raison d’être for Mozi:

And here we are, 20+ years later, with address books full of
partial, duplicate, and outdated information. Perhaps the reason
for this is that social networks (or the social network) solved
this problem — for a while. When Facebook was ubiquitous it was
probably a pretty good reflection of many people’s real-life
relationships. It told you where they lived, who you knew in
common, and all kinds of other details.

Another idea that seemed obvious was that, given how deeply social
humans are, social products would dominate the internet. Ten to
fifteen years ago, this seemed inevitable.

But something else happened instead.

Social networks became “social media,” which, at first, meant
receiving content from people you chose to hear from. But in the
quest to maximize engagement, the timeline of friends and people
you picked to follow turned into a free-for-all battle for
attention. And it turns out, for most people, your friends aren’t
as entertaining as (god forbid) influencers who spend their
waking hours making “content.”

In other words, social media became … media.

To tell you the truth, I think there are positive aspects of this
evolution (perhaps I’ll get into that in another post). But we
clearly lost something.

This whole piece is so good, so clear. This distinction between social networking and social media is obvious in hindsight, but only in hindsight. Williams posted it on Medium (natch), but Mozi’s website links directly to it for their “About” page. I’m excited about this. I think they’re on to something here. It’s even a great name.

 ★ 

Ev Williams, writing the backstory of, and raison d’être for Mozi:

And here we are, 20+ years later, with address books full of
partial, duplicate, and outdated information. Perhaps the reason
for this is that social networks (or the social network) solved
this problem — for a while. When Facebook was ubiquitous it was
probably a pretty good reflection of many people’s real-life
relationships. It told you where they lived, who you knew in
common, and all kinds of other details.

Another idea that seemed obvious was that, given how deeply social
humans are, social products would dominate the internet. Ten to
fifteen years ago, this seemed inevitable.

But something else happened instead.

Social networks became “social media,” which, at first, meant
receiving content from people you chose to hear from. But in the
quest to maximize engagement, the timeline of friends and people
you picked to follow turned into a free-for-all battle for
attention. And it turns out, for most people, your friends aren’t
as entertaining as (god forbid) influencers who spend their
waking hours making “content.”

In other words, social media became … media.

To tell you the truth, I think there are positive aspects of this
evolution (perhaps I’ll get into that in another post). But we
clearly lost something.

This whole piece is so good, so clear. This distinction between social networking and social media is obvious in hindsight, but only in hindsight. Williams posted it on Medium (natch), but Mozi’s website links directly to it for their “About” page. I’m excited about this. I think they’re on to something here. It’s even a great name.

Read More 

New app, spearheaded by Ev Williams:

Mozi is a private social network for seeing your people more, IRL.
Add your plans, check who’s in town, and know when you overlap.

iOS only at the moment, with “Sign in with Apple” as the only supported authentication method. One clever idea is that you can share travel plans and your location, and Mozi will coordinate when you might be in the same area as a friend. From their FAQ:

Why do you need access to my contacts? Will you ever contact
people in my phone book?

Never. We ask for access to your contacts so that you can connect
with the people you already know on Mozi. In order to see someone
on Mozi, you have to both be on Mozi and both have one another
saved as iOS contacts. We never send, sell or share any of your
information, and we will never contact your people on your behalf.
And instead of storing any actual phone numbers, we hash (encrypt)
them. This ensures both your number and all your contacts remain
anonymized and protected.

I’m in, and so far only have three mutuals. But — all three of them are people whose in-person company I truly enjoy. We’ve all, correctly, got our guards up regarding new “social” platforms that want our personal information, but we’ve collectively become so cynical that I worry people don’t even want to try fun new things like Mozi. Ev Williams is uniquely placed to make something like this happen in a trustworthy way.

I’m mostly rooting for Mozi to succeed because I think something like this could work in a way that has nothing but upsides, and there’s nothing like it today. But I’m also rooting for Mozi to take off just to burst the absurdity of Kevin Roose’s October piece in the New York Times trying to make the case that Apple “killed social apps” by increasing the privacy controls for our iOS contacts. I gladly shared my whole contacts list with Mozi, based on the track record of the team and the FAQ quoted above.

Speaking of the NYT, Erin Griffith wrote a profile of Williams for the launch of Mozi:

“The internet did make us more connected,” he said in an interview
in Menlo Park, Calif. “It just also made us more divided. It made
us more everything.”

Mozi is meant to be a utility. If a user wants to message a friend
in the app to make plans, the app directs them to the phone’s
texting app.

 ★ 

New app, spearheaded by Ev Williams:

Mozi is a private social network for seeing your people more, IRL.
Add your plans, check who’s in town, and know when you overlap.

iOS only at the moment, with “Sign in with Apple” as the only supported authentication method. One clever idea is that you can share travel plans and your location, and Mozi will coordinate when you might be in the same area as a friend. From their FAQ:

Why do you need access to my contacts? Will you ever contact
people in my phone book?

Never. We ask for access to your contacts so that you can connect
with the people you already know on Mozi. In order to see someone
on Mozi, you have to both be on Mozi and both have one another
saved as iOS contacts. We never send, sell or share any of your
information, and we will never contact your people on your behalf.
And instead of storing any actual phone numbers, we hash (encrypt)
them. This ensures both your number and all your contacts remain
anonymized and protected.

I’m in, and so far only have three mutuals. But — all three of them are people whose in-person company I truly enjoy. We’ve all, correctly, got our guards up regarding new “social” platforms that want our personal information, but we’ve collectively become so cynical that I worry people don’t even want to try fun new things like Mozi. Ev Williams is uniquely placed to make something like this happen in a trustworthy way.

I’m mostly rooting for Mozi to succeed because I think something like this could work in a way that has nothing but upsides, and there’s nothing like it today. But I’m also rooting for Mozi to take off just to burst the absurdity of Kevin Roose’s October piece in the New York Times trying to make the case that Apple “killed social apps” by increasing the privacy controls for our iOS contacts. I gladly shared my whole contacts list with Mozi, based on the track record of the team and the FAQ quoted above.

Speaking of the NYT, Erin Griffith wrote a profile of Williams for the launch of Mozi:

“The internet did make us more connected,” he said in an interview
in Menlo Park, Calif. “It just also made us more divided. It made
us more everything.”

Mozi is meant to be a utility. If a user wants to message a friend
in the app to make plans, the app directs them to the phone’s
texting app.

Read More 

One last Letterman link: a new half-hour interview about interviewing with Zach Baron for GQ. I watched the first minute and I’m saving the rest for tonight:

Baron: If you read pieces about you — pieces of press, profile
stuff like that — from ’80s and ’90s, even a little bit in the
2000s, you were often betrayed as miserable.

Letterman: (laughs hardily) Yeah, that’s great. I love that.

 ★ 

One last Letterman link: a new half-hour interview about interviewing with Zach Baron for GQ. I watched the first minute and I’m saving the rest for tonight:

Baron: If you read pieces about you — pieces of press, profile
stuff like that — from ’80s and ’90s, even a little bit in the
2000s, you were often betrayed as miserable.

Letterman: (laughs hardily) Yeah, that’s great. I love that.

Read More 

The New York Times:

George J. Kresge, who as the entertainer the Amazing Kreskin used
mentalist tricks to dazzle audiences as he rose to fame on
late-night television in the 1970s, died on Tuesday in Wayne, N.J.
He was 89. A close friend, Meir Yedid, said the death, at an
assisted living facility, was from complications of dementia.

Kreskin’s feats included divining details of strangers’ personal
lives and guessing at playing cards chosen randomly from a deck.
And he had a classic trick at live shows: entrusting audience
members to hide his paycheck in the auditorium, and then relying
on his instincts to find it — or else going without payment for
a night.

Somehow his first appearance with Letterman wasn’t until 1990, but after that he was a regular. Just a canonical “late night talk show guest” of that era. He was good at the mentalist tricks, but what made Kreskin great — amazing even — was that he was just such a weird, fun, and funny guy.

 ★ 

The New York Times:

George J. Kresge, who as the entertainer the Amazing Kreskin used
mentalist tricks to dazzle audiences as he rose to fame on
late-night television in the 1970s, died on Tuesday in Wayne, N.J.
He was 89. A close friend, Meir Yedid, said the death, at an
assisted living facility, was from complications of dementia.

Kreskin’s feats included divining details of strangers’ personal
lives and guessing at playing cards chosen randomly from a deck.
And he had a classic trick at live shows: entrusting audience
members to hide his paycheck in the auditorium, and then relying
on his instincts to find it — or else going without payment for
a night.

Somehow his first appearance with Letterman wasn’t until 1990, but after that he was a regular. Just a canonical “late night talk show guest” of that era. He was good at the mentalist tricks, but what made Kreskin great — amazing even — was that he was just such a weird, fun, and funny guy.

Read More 

Reporting from The Information suggests that an M-series tier above Ultra might remain years away.

Wayne Ma and Qianer Liu, in a piece today for The Information (paywalled up the wazoo, sadly), “Apple Is Working on AI Chip With Broadcom”:

Apple is developing its first server chip specially designed for
artificial intelligence, according to three people with direct
knowledge of the project, as the iPhone maker prepares to deal
with the intense computing demands of its new AI features. Apple
is working with Broadcom on the chip’s networking technology,
which is crucial for AI processing, according to one of the
people. If Apple succeeds with the AI chip — internally
code-named Baltra and expected to be ready for mass production by
2026 — it would mark a significant milestone for the company’s
silicon team. […]

Broadcom typically doesn’t license its intellectual property,
choosing instead to sell chips directly to customers. In its
arrangement with Google, for instance, Broadcom translates
Google’s AI chip blueprints into designs that can be manufactured,
oversees its production with TSMC and sells the finished chips to
Google at a markup.

But Broadcom appears to be taking a different tack with Apple.
Broadcom is providing a more limited scope of design services to
Apple while still providing the iPhone maker with its networking
technology, one of the people said. Apple is still managing the
chip’s production, which TSMC will handle, another person said.
Additional details of the business arrangement couldn’t be learned
[sic]1

I’ll go out on a limb and say that it’s Apple choosing to take a different tack with Broadcom than Google did, rather than a choice in any way driven by Broadcom. The Information’s own “arrangement with Google” link above points to this year-ago report that opens: “Google executives have extensively discussed dropping Broadcom as a supplier of artificial intelligence chips as early as 2027, according to a person with direct knowledge of the effort. In that scenario, Google would fully design the chips, known as tensor processing units, in-house, the person said. The move could help Google save billions of dollars in costs annually as it invests heavily in AI development, which is especially pricey compared to other types of computing.” Why would Apple ever agree to an arrangement like that?

The hint of obsequiousness to Broadcom suggests to me, pretty clearly, that it’s sources from Broadcom who provided the leaks for this story.

Anyway, what really caught my eye in this report wasn’t the AI server chips, but rather the following (emphasis to key paragraph added), included seemingly only as an aside even though I thought it was the most interesting nugget in the report (vague shades of Fermat’s Last Theorem):

Apple’s silicon design team in Israel is leading development of
the AI chip, according to two of the people. That team was
instrumental in designing the processors Apple introduced in 2020
to replace Intel chips in Macs.

Apple this past summer canceled the development of a
high-performance chip for Macs — consisting of four smaller chips
stitched together — to free up some of its engineers in Israel to
work on the AI chip, one of the people said, highlighting the
company’s shifting priorities.

To make the chip, Apple is planning to use one of TSMC’s most
advanced manufacturing processes, known as N3P, said three
people with direct knowledge. That would be an improvement over
the manufacturing process used for Apple’s latest computer
processor, the M4.

What they’re talking about regarding a cancelled high-end Mac chip would be a hypothetical M-series chip with (effectively) double the specs of an Ultra, which I presume would only be available in a future Mac Pro, and, just pulling adjectives from Apple’s marketing dictionary, I’d bet would be called the “M# Extreme” (where “#” is the M-series generation number). The M1 and M2 Ultra chips are, effectively, two M1/M2 Max chips fused together with something called a silicon interposer that offers extremely high-speed I/O between the fused chips. Performance doesn’t exactly double, but it comes close. A hypothetical quad-Max “Extreme” would effectively double the performance of the same-generation Ultra chips. Such a chip, available exclusively in the Mac Pro, would give the Mac Pro a much more obvious reason to exist alongside the Mac Studio (which, to date, has offered Max and Ultra chip configurations).

But if Apple’s work on that quad-interposed M-series chip was cancelled only “this past summer”, and was for a generation of chips using TSMC’s next-generation N3P process, that would mean it was slated for the M5 or M6 generation, not the M4.2 The M4 generation is fabbed using TSMC’s N3E process, and any additional variants beyond the M4 Max, slated for updated Mac Studios and Mac Pros next year, were designed long before this past summer.

I feel like it’s a lock that there will be an M4 Ultra chip next year, with the performance of two M4 Max chips fused together. Or, perhaps the M4 Ultra will be a standalone design, not two Max chips fused. The M-series Max chips have always been their own designs — not two Pro chips fused together. The same could be true for Ultra chips, starting next year, or some generation further into the future.

But I’ve had my fingers crossed that we’ll also see an “M4 Extreme” — or whatever Apple would decide to call a tier above “Ultra” — sooner rather than later. If The Information’s reporting is correct, however, either we’ll see a quad-Max M4 chip next year, and then it will skip a generation because the engineering team was redirected to work on these AI server chips, or, those engineers were working on the first quad-Max M-series chips, and now the first such M-series chips have been punted even further into the future, if ever. Today’s report has me thinking, sadly, that could be a few years off, at the soonest.

Read More 

Erik Hayden, reporting for The Hollywood Reporter:

For his next move, David Letterman is jumping in to the
increasingly crowded free, ad-supported TV channel (FAST) space.

The late-night great’s production company Worldwide Pants has
inked a deal with Samsung TV Plus to bring around 4,000 hours of
original video to the company’s streaming service, the firms said
Wednesday. “I’m very excited about this,” stated Letterman, who
glibly added, “Now I can watch myself age without looking in the
mirror!”

The output for the 24/7 on-demand channel titled Letterman TV
appears to rely heavily on archival clips from his nearly 33-year
late-night run, including his CBS Late Show Top Ten lists, “Stupid
Tricks” segments, interviews with stars, holiday specials and
behind-the-scenes clips along with fresh commentary from
Letterman, presumably on all the above.

I don’t know how different this will be from Letterman’s excellent YouTube channel, but honest to god I’d never even heard of “Samsung TV Plus” until reading this.

 ★ 

Erik Hayden, reporting for The Hollywood Reporter:

For his next move, David Letterman is jumping in to the
increasingly crowded free, ad-supported TV channel (FAST) space.

The late-night great’s production company Worldwide Pants has
inked a deal with Samsung TV Plus to bring around 4,000 hours of
original video to the company’s streaming service, the firms said
Wednesday. “I’m very excited about this,” stated Letterman, who
glibly added, “Now I can watch myself age without looking in the
mirror!”

The output for the 24/7 on-demand channel titled Letterman TV
appears to rely heavily on archival clips from his nearly 33-year
late-night run, including his CBS Late Show Top Ten lists, “Stupid
Tricks” segments, interviews with stars, holiday specials and
behind-the-scenes clips along with fresh commentary from
Letterman, presumably on all the above.

I don’t know how different this will be from Letterman’s excellent YouTube channel, but honest to god I’d never even heard of “Samsung TV Plus” until reading this.

Read More 

Juli Clover at MacRumors:

Apple today made a mistake with its macOS Sequoia 15.2 update,
releasing the software for two Macs that have yet to be launched.
There is a software file for “Mac16,12” and “Mac16,13,” which are
upcoming MacBook Air models.

The leaked software references the “MacBook Air (13-inch, M4,
2025)” and the “MacBook Air (15-inch, M4, 2025),” confirming that
new M4 MacBook Air models are in development and are likely not
too far off from launching.

It’s been widely rumored that Apple is working to bring the M4
chips to its entire Mac lineup, and the MacBook Air is expected to
get an M4 refresh in the spring of 2025, so sometime between March
and June.

Were these references not in the 15.2 betas? If not, what a weird mistake to happen only in the release builds. But regardless, even inside Apple, I’d file this under “no big whoop”. Of course there are going to be M4-based MacBook Airs next year. The only question is when. My guess is March, just like last year.

“Apple Newsroom: “Apple Unveils the New 13- and 15‑Inch MacBook Air With the Powerful M3 Chip””

 ★ 

Juli Clover at MacRumors:

Apple today made a mistake with its macOS Sequoia 15.2 update,
releasing the software for two Macs that have yet to be launched.
There is a software file for “Mac16,12” and “Mac16,13,” which are
upcoming MacBook Air models.

The leaked software references the “MacBook Air (13-inch, M4,
2025)” and the “MacBook Air (15-inch, M4, 2025),” confirming that
new M4 MacBook Air models are in development and are likely not
too far off from launching.

It’s been widely rumored that Apple is working to bring the M4
chips to its entire Mac lineup, and the MacBook Air is expected to
get an M4 refresh in the spring of 2025, so sometime between March
and June.

Were these references not in the 15.2 betas? If not, what a weird mistake to happen only in the release builds. But regardless, even inside Apple, I’d file this under “no big whoop”. Of course there are going to be M4-based MacBook Airs next year. The only question is when. My guess is March, just like last year.

“Apple Newsroom: “Apple Unveils the New 13- and 15‑Inch MacBook Air With the Powerful M3 Chip””

Read More 

David Ingram, reporting for NBC News:

U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Christopher Lopez said after a two-day hearing that The Onion’s parent company, Global Tetrahedron, had not submitted the best bid and was wrongly named the winner of an auction last month by a court-appointed trustee.

“I don’t think it’s enough money,” Lopez said in a late-night ruling from the bench in a Houston court. “I’m going to not approve the sale.”

It’s not over ’til it’s over.

 ★ 

David Ingram, reporting for NBC News:

U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Christopher Lopez said after a two-day hearing that The Onion’s parent company, Global Tetrahedron, had not submitted the best bid and was wrongly named the winner of an auction last month by a court-appointed trustee.

“I don’t think it’s enough money,” Lopez said in a late-night ruling from the bench in a Houston court. “I’m going to not approve the sale.”

It’s not over ’til it’s over.

Read More 

Brandon Silverman:

It was September of 2011 and I saw a link on kottke.org to a
small collection of incredible typography from something
called the Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps. I had never seen them
before and they blew my mind. I immediately became a massive fan
and in fact, when I got married, my wife and I designed our
wedding invitation based off of them.

However, there has never been a place to see all of the art from
the maps in one place. Until now.

This website is a free archive dedicated exclusively to creating
a one-stop shop for all the incredible typography and art of the
Sanborn maps. It includes almost 3,500 unique decorative titles,
all drawn before 1923. While large portions of the original maps
have been digitized and archived in various places both online and
offline, there has never been a comprehensive collection of all of
the decorative titles from the Sanborn maps. I hope you enjoy!

I just love this style of turn-of-the-century typography and graphic design. (The last turn of the century, that is.) In our era, this style has been used to wonderful effect by the great Chris Ware.

Via, no surprise, Kottke. What comes around goes around.

 ★ 

Brandon Silverman:

It was September of 2011 and I saw a link on kottke.org to a
small collection of incredible typography from something
called the Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps. I had never seen them
before and they blew my mind. I immediately became a massive fan
and in fact, when I got married, my wife and I designed our
wedding invitation based off of them.

However, there has never been a place to see all of the art from
the maps in one place. Until now.

This website is a free archive dedicated exclusively to creating
a one-stop shop for all the incredible typography and art of the
Sanborn maps. It includes almost 3,500 unique decorative titles,
all drawn before 1923. While large portions of the original maps
have been digitized and archived in various places both online and
offline, there has never been a comprehensive collection of all of
the decorative titles from the Sanborn maps. I hope you enjoy!

I just love this style of turn-of-the-century typography and graphic design. (The last turn of the century, that is.) In our era, this style has been used to wonderful effect by the great Chris Ware.

Via, no surprise, Kottke. What comes around goes around.

Read More