daring-rss

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 

My thanks to 1Password — which, earlier this year, acquired frequent DF sponsor Kolide — for sponsoring last week at DF. Imagine if you went to the movies and they charged $8,000 for popcorn. Or, imagine you got on a plane and they told you that seatbelts were only available in first class. Your sense of outraged injustice would probably be something like what IT and security professionals feel when a software vendor hits them with the dreaded SSO tax — the practice of charging an outrageous premium for Single Sign-On, often by making it part of a product’s “enterprise tier”. The jump in price can be astonishing — one CRM charges over 5000% more for the tier with SSO. At those prices, only very large companies can afford to pay for SSO. But the problem is that companies of all sizes need it.

Until outraged customers can shame vendors into getting rid of the tax, many businesses have to figure out how to live without SSO. For them, the best route is likely to be a password manager, which also reduces weak and re-used credentials, and enables secure sharing across teams. And a password manager is likely a good investment anyway, for apps that aren’t integrated with SSO. To learn more about the past, present, and future of the SSO tax, read 1Password’s full blog post.

 ★ 

My thanks to 1Password — which, earlier this year, acquired frequent DF sponsor Kolide — for sponsoring last week at DF. Imagine if you went to the movies and they charged $8,000 for popcorn. Or, imagine you got on a plane and they told you that seatbelts were only available in first class. Your sense of outraged injustice would probably be something like what IT and security professionals feel when a software vendor hits them with the dreaded SSO tax — the practice of charging an outrageous premium for Single Sign-On, often by making it part of a product’s “enterprise tier”. The jump in price can be astonishing — one CRM charges over 5000% more for the tier with SSO. At those prices, only very large companies can afford to pay for SSO. But the problem is that companies of all sizes need it.

Until outraged customers can shame vendors into getting rid of the tax, many businesses have to figure out how to live without SSO. For them, the best route is likely to be a password manager, which also reduces weak and re-used credentials, and enables secure sharing across teams. And a password manager is likely a good investment anyway, for apps that aren’t integrated with SSO. To learn more about the past, present, and future of the SSO tax, read 1Password’s full blog post.

Read More 

Mark Gurman, in his Power On column for Bloomberg:

Apple is now working on a major effort to support third-party hand
controllers in the device’s visionOS software and has teamed up
with Sony Group Corp. to make it happen. Apple approached Sony
earlier this year, and the duo agreed to work together on
launching support for the PlayStation VR2’s hand controllers on
the Vision Pro. Inside Sony, the work has been a monthslong
undertaking, I’m told. And Apple has discussed the plan with
third-party developers, asking them if they’d integrate support
into their games. […]

One hiccup is that Sony doesn’t currently sell its VR hand
controllers as a standalone accessory. The company would need to
decouple the equipment from its own headset and kick off
operations to produce and ship the accessory on its own. As part
of the arrangement, Sony would sell the controllers at Apple’s
online and retail stores, which already offer PS5 versions.

 ★ 

Mark Gurman, in his Power On column for Bloomberg:

Apple is now working on a major effort to support third-party hand
controllers in the device’s visionOS software and has teamed up
with Sony Group Corp. to make it happen. Apple approached Sony
earlier this year, and the duo agreed to work together on
launching support for the PlayStation VR2’s hand controllers on
the Vision Pro. Inside Sony, the work has been a monthslong
undertaking, I’m told. And Apple has discussed the plan with
third-party developers, asking them if they’d integrate support
into their games. […]

One hiccup is that Sony doesn’t currently sell its VR hand
controllers as a standalone accessory. The company would need to
decouple the equipment from its own headset and kick off
operations to produce and ship the accessory on its own. As part
of the arrangement, Sony would sell the controllers at Apple’s
online and retail stores, which already offer PS5 versions.

Read More 

Late-breaking candidate for best new font of 2024.

 ★ 

Late-breaking candidate for best new font of 2024.

Read More 

While there is no subscription offering for Daring Fireball (never say never again), I am reminded this week to remind you that, if you enjoy podcasts, you should subscribe to Dithering, the twice-weekly 15-minutes-on-the-button podcast I do with Ben Thompson. Dithering as a standalone subscription costs just $7/month or $70/year. People who try Dithering seem to love it, too — we have remarkably little churn.

Recording the show often helps me coagulate loose ideas into fully-formed thoughts. Both my Tuesday column on Intel’s decline and today’s on using generative AI for research were inspired by our discussion on the show the night before. I toss a lot of takes out on Dithering that never make it here, though. If you’re on the fence, subscribe for a month and you’re only out $7 — but I bet you’ll stick around. Trust me. And thanks to everyone who’s already subscribed.

 ★ 

While there is no subscription offering for Daring Fireball (never say never again), I am reminded this week to remind you that, if you enjoy podcasts, you should subscribe to Dithering, the twice-weekly 15-minutes-on-the-button podcast I do with Ben Thompson. Dithering as a standalone subscription costs just $7/month or $70/year. People who try Dithering seem to love it, too — we have remarkably little churn.

Recording the show often helps me coagulate loose ideas into fully-formed thoughts. Both my Tuesday column on Intel’s decline and today’s on using generative AI for research were inspired by our discussion on the show the night before. I toss a lot of takes out on Dithering that never make it here, though. If you’re on the fence, subscribe for a month and you’re only out $7 — but I bet you’ll stick around. Trust me. And thanks to everyone who’s already subscribed.

Read More 

If I had wanted to write a column about presidential pardons, I’d find ChatGPT’s assistance a far better starting point than I’d have gotten through any general web search. But to quote Reagan: “Trust, but verify.”

Elizabeth Lopatto, writing for The Verge, “Stop Using Generative AI as a Search Engine”:

Now, a defender of AI might — rightly — say that a real
journalist should check the answers provided by ChatGPT; that
fact-checking is a critical part of our job. I agree, which is why
I’ve walked you through my own checking in this article. But these
are only the public and embarrassing examples of something I think
is happening much more often in private: a normal person is using
ChatGPT and trusting the information it gives them.

A mistake, obviously.

One advantage old-school Google Search has over the so-called
answer engines is that it links directly to primary sources.
Answer engines just give you an answer, and it’s often unclear
what the source is. For me, using ChatGPT or Google’s AI function
creates extra work — I have to go check the answer against a
primary source; old Google Search just gave me that source
directly.

Lopatto’s piece was prompted by a spate of historical bullshit people have been inadvertently propagating, after their asking generative AI systems for historical examples of presidents granting pardons to family members. Most notably, a column by Charles P. Pierce at Esquire this week — now fully retracted — the entire premise of which was a supposed pardon granted by George H.W. Bush to his black-sheep son Neil Bush. No such pardon was granted.1

Lopatto’s piece is excellent, particularly the way she shows her own work. And the entire premise of her piece is that people are, in fact, embarrassing themselves (in Pierce’s case, spectacularly) and inadvertently spreading misinformation by blindly trusting the answers they’re getting from generative AI models. But I think it’s wrong to argue flatly against the use of generative AI for research, as she does right in her headline. I’ve been late to using generative AI as anything other than a toy curiosity, but in recent months I’ve started using it for work-related research. And now that I’ve started, I’m using it more and more. My basic rule of thumb is that if I’m looking for an article or web page, I use web search (Kagi); if I’m looking for an answer to a question, though, I use ChatGPT (4o). I direct ChatGPT — and trust it as much as — I would a college intern working as a research assistant. I expect accuracy, but assume that I need to double-check everything.

Here’s how I prompted ChatGPT, pretending I intended to write about this week’s political controversy du jour:

Give me a list of U.S. presidential pardons granted to family
members, friends, administration officials, and cronies. Basically
I’m looking for a list of controversial pardons. I’m interested in
the totality of U.S. history, but particularly in recent history,
let’s say the last 100 years.

ChatGPT 4o’s response was good: here’s a link to my chat, and an HTML transcript and a screenshot. (Only the screenshot shows where ChatGPT included sources.) I’m quite certain ChatGPT’s response is completely true, and it strikes me as a fair summary of the most controversial pardons in my lifetime. My biggest quibble is that it omits Trump’s pardon of Steve Bannon, a truly outrageous pardon of a genuine scumbag who was an official White House advisor. (Bannon was indicted for a multi-million dollar scheme in which he scammed thousands of political donors into believing they were contributing funds to help build Trump’s fantasy “border wall”.) However, my asking “Any more from Trump?” as a follow-up resulted in a longer list of 13 pardons, all factual, that included Bannon.2

If I had wanted to write a column about presidential pardons, I’d find ChatGPT’s assistance a far better starting point than I’d have gotten through any general web search. But to quote an adage Reagan was fond of: “Trust, but verify.”

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David Frum, writing at The Atlantic, regarding his jarring appearance as a guest on MSNBC’s Morning Joe:

Before getting to the article, I was asked about the nomination of
Pete Hegseth as secretary of defense — specifically about an NBC
News report that his heavy drinking worried colleagues
at Fox News and at the veterans organizations he’d
headed. […] I answered by reminding viewers of some history:

In 1989, President George H. W. Bush nominated John Tower,
senator from Texas, for secretary of defense. Tower was a very
considerable person, a real defense intellectual, someone who
deeply understood defense, unlike the current nominee. It emerged
that Tower had a drinking problem, and when he was drinking too
much he would make himself a nuisance or worse to women around
him. And for that reason, his nomination collapsed in 1989. You
don’t want to think that our moral standards have declined so
much that you can say: Let’s take all the drinking, all the
sex-pesting, subtract any knowledge of defense, subtract any
leadership, and there is your next secretary of defense for the
21st century.

I told this story in pungent terms. It’s cable TV, after all. And
I introduced the discussion with a joke: “If you’re too drunk for
Fox News, you’re very, very drunk indeed.”

At the next ad break, a producer spoke into my ear. He objected to
my comments about Fox and warned me not to repeat them. I said
something noncommittal and got another round of warning. After the
break, I was asked a follow-up question on a different topic,
about President Joe Biden’s pardon of his son. I did not revert to
the earlier discussion, not because I had been warned, but because
I had said my piece. I was then told that I was excused from the
studio chair. Shortly afterward, co-host Mika Brzezinski read an
apology for my remarks.

Jesus. The abject obsequiousness is staggering. Yes, it’s a joke at Fox News’s expense. But Fox News — on-air — has indeed been backing Hegseth’s nomination, even though it’s quite obvious that everyone who works there knows he has an alcohol problem. From that NBC News report (note that despite their names, the MSNBC and NBC News newsrooms are no longer associated):

Pete Hegseth, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for defense
secretary, drank in ways that concerned his colleagues at Fox
News, according to 10 current and former Fox employees who spoke
with NBC News. Two of those people said that on more than a dozen
occasions during Hegseth’s time as a co-host of Fox & Friends
Weekend, which began in 2017, they smelled alcohol on him before
he went on air. Those same two people, plus another, said that
during his time there he appeared on television after they’d heard
him talk about being hungover as he was getting ready or on set.

One of the sources said they smelled alcohol on him as recently
as last month and heard him complain about being hungover this
fall. None of the sources with whom NBC News has spoken could
recall an instance when Hegseth missed a scheduled appearance
because he’d been drinking. “Everyone would be talking about it
behind the scenes before he went on the air,” one of the former
Fox employees said.

Note too that Fox & Friends Weekend airs at 6:00 in the morning.

 ★ 

David Frum, writing at The Atlantic, regarding his jarring appearance as a guest on MSNBC’s Morning Joe:

Before getting to the article, I was asked about the nomination of
Pete Hegseth as secretary of defense — specifically about an NBC
News report that his heavy drinking worried colleagues
at Fox News and at the veterans organizations he’d
headed. […] I answered by reminding viewers of some history:

In 1989, President George H. W. Bush nominated John Tower,
senator from Texas, for secretary of defense. Tower was a very
considerable person, a real defense intellectual, someone who
deeply understood defense, unlike the current nominee. It emerged
that Tower had a drinking problem, and when he was drinking too
much he would make himself a nuisance or worse to women around
him. And for that reason, his nomination collapsed in 1989. You
don’t want to think that our moral standards have declined so
much that you can say: Let’s take all the drinking, all the
sex-pesting, subtract any knowledge of defense, subtract any
leadership, and there is your next secretary of defense for the
21st century.

I told this story in pungent terms. It’s cable TV, after all. And
I introduced the discussion with a joke: “If you’re too drunk for
Fox News, you’re very, very drunk indeed.”

At the next ad break, a producer spoke into my ear. He objected to
my comments about Fox and warned me not to repeat them. I said
something noncommittal and got another round of warning. After the
break, I was asked a follow-up question on a different topic,
about President Joe Biden’s pardon of his son. I did not revert to
the earlier discussion, not because I had been warned, but because
I had said my piece. I was then told that I was excused from the
studio chair. Shortly afterward, co-host Mika Brzezinski read an
apology for my remarks.

Jesus. The abject obsequiousness is staggering. Yes, it’s a joke at Fox News’s expense. But Fox News — on-air — has indeed been backing Hegseth’s nomination, even though it’s quite obvious that everyone who works there knows he has an alcohol problem. From that NBC News report (note that despite their names, the MSNBC and NBC News newsrooms are no longer associated):

Pete Hegseth, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for defense
secretary, drank in ways that concerned his colleagues at Fox
News, according to 10 current and former Fox employees who spoke
with NBC News. Two of those people said that on more than a dozen
occasions during Hegseth’s time as a co-host of Fox & Friends
Weekend, which began in 2017, they smelled alcohol on him before
he went on air. Those same two people, plus another, said that
during his time there he appeared on television after they’d heard
him talk about being hungover as he was getting ready or on set.

One of the sources said they smelled alcohol on him as recently
as last month and heard him complain about being hungover this
fall. None of the sources with whom NBC News has spoken could
recall an instance when Hegseth missed a scheduled appearance
because he’d been drinking. “Everyone would be talking about it
behind the scenes before he went on the air,” one of the former
Fox employees said.

Note too that Fox & Friends Weekend airs at 6:00 in the morning.

Read More 

Oliver Darcy, in a well-sourced report at Status (paywalled, alas, but with a preview of the article if you sign up for the free version of his newsletter, which I agree is sort of a “Yeah, no thanks” offer):

Patrick Soon-Shiong is tightening his grip over the Los Angeles Times.

The MAGA-curious owner, who drew controversy when he blocked the newspaper’s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris, has waded further into its operations since the November election, according to new information I have learned and public remarks the billionaire made Wednesday during a media appearance with right-wing personality Scott Jennings. The meddling has alarmed staffers, some of whom now harbor concerns that the billionaire presents an active danger to the paper they once believed he might help rescue. […] Several veteran staffers told me that morale has never been lower, with some people even wondering whether the newspaper will be disfigured beyond recognition under this new era of Soon-Shiong’s reign.

 ★ 

Oliver Darcy, in a well-sourced report at Status (paywalled, alas, but with a preview of the article if you sign up for the free version of his newsletter, which I agree is sort of a “Yeah, no thanks” offer):

Patrick Soon-Shiong is tightening his grip over the Los Angeles Times.

The MAGA-curious owner, who drew controversy when he blocked the newspaper’s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris, has waded further into its operations since the November election, according to new information I have learned and public remarks the billionaire made Wednesday during a media appearance with right-wing personality Scott Jennings. The meddling has alarmed staffers, some of whom now harbor concerns that the billionaire presents an active danger to the paper they once believed he might help rescue. […] Several veteran staffers told me that morale has never been lower, with some people even wondering whether the newspaper will be disfigured beyond recognition under this new era of Soon-Shiong’s reign.

Read More 

Purely fun, pay-whatever-you-think-fair app for the Mac from Simon Støvring (developer of numerous fine apps such as Runestone and Scriptable):

Festivitas automatically adds festive lights to your menu bar and
dock upon launch and you can tweak their appearance to match your
preferences.

There is something very core to the Mac’s origins about not just making a software toy like this, but putting effort into making everything about it really nice. Harks back to Steven Halls’s The Talking Moose and, of course, the undisputed king of the genre, Eric Shapiro’s The Grouch.

 ★ 

Purely fun, pay-whatever-you-think-fair app for the Mac from Simon Støvring (developer of numerous fine apps such as Runestone and Scriptable):

Festivitas automatically adds festive lights to your menu bar and
dock upon launch and you can tweak their appearance to match your
preferences.

There is something very core to the Mac’s origins about not just making a software toy like this, but putting effort into making everything about it really nice. Harks back to Steven Halls’s The Talking Moose and, of course, the undisputed king of the genre, Eric Shapiro’s The Grouch.

Read More 

Stephanie Palazzolo, writing for The Information (paywalled, alas):

Researchers at OpenAI believe that some rival AI developers are
training their reasoning models by using OpenAI’s o1 reasoning
models to generate training data, according to a person who has
spoken to the company’s researchers about it. In short, the rivals
can ask the o1 models to solve various problems and then use the
models’ chain of thought — the “thought process” the models use
to solve those problems — as training data, the person said.

You might be wondering how rival developers can do that. OpenAI
has explicitly said it hides its reasoning models’ raw chains of
thought due in part to competitive concerns.

But in answering questions, o1 models include a summarized version
of the chain of thought to help the customer understand how the
models arrived at the answer. Rivals can simply ask another LLM to
take that summarized chain of thought and predict what the raw
chain of thought might have been, the person who spoke with the
researchers said.

And I’m sure these OpenAI researchers are happy to provide this training data to competitors, without having granted permission, in the same way they trained (and continue to train) their own models on publicly available web pages, without having been granted permission. Right?

 ★ 

Stephanie Palazzolo, writing for The Information (paywalled, alas):

Researchers at OpenAI believe that some rival AI developers are
training their reasoning models by using OpenAI’s o1 reasoning
models to generate training data, according to a person who has
spoken to the company’s researchers about it. In short, the rivals
can ask the o1 models to solve various problems and then use the
models’ chain of thought — the “thought process” the models use
to solve those problems — as training data, the person said.

You might be wondering how rival developers can do that. OpenAI
has explicitly said it hides its reasoning models’ raw chains of
thought due in part to competitive concerns.

But in answering questions, o1 models include a summarized version
of the chain of thought to help the customer understand how the
models arrived at the answer. Rivals can simply ask another LLM to
take that summarized chain of thought and predict what the raw
chain of thought might have been, the person who spoke with the
researchers said.

And I’m sure these OpenAI researchers are happy to provide this training data to competitors, without having granted permission, in the same way they trained (and continue to train) their own models on publicly available web pages, without having been granted permission. Right?

Read More