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AnnaMaria Andriotis, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (News+):

Apple is pulling the plug on its credit-card partnership with
Goldman Sachs, the final nail in the coffin of the Wall Street
bank’s bid to expand into consumer lending.

The tech giant recently sent a proposal to Goldman to exit from
the contract in the next roughly 12-to-15 months, according to
people briefed on the matter. The exit would cover their entire
consumer partnership, including the credit card the companies
launched in 2019 and the savings account rolled out this year.

It couldn’t be learned whether Apple has already lined up a new
issuer for the card.

Apple Card is a strange product — everyone I know who has one likes it (including me), but Goldman itself has reported that they’ve lost $3 billion since 2020 on it. The savings accounts are a hit with customers too.

American Express is rumored to be one possible partner, but it would be pretty strange for Apple Cards to transmogrify from MasterCard to Amex cards overnight. There are still a lot of businesses — particularly throughout Europe — that accept MasterCard but not Amex. It’s not just that Apple Card would no longer be accepted at businesses where previously it was, but that would highlight the fact that Apple Card is really just an Apple-branded card issued by a company that isn’t Apple. Apple wants you to think of Apple Card as, well, an Apple credit card.

 ★ 

AnnaMaria Andriotis, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (News+):

Apple is pulling the plug on its credit-card partnership with
Goldman Sachs, the final nail in the coffin of the Wall Street
bank’s bid to expand into consumer lending.

The tech giant recently sent a proposal to Goldman to exit from
the contract in the next roughly 12-to-15 months, according to
people briefed on the matter. The exit would cover their entire
consumer partnership, including the credit card the companies
launched in 2019 and the savings account rolled out this year.

It couldn’t be learned whether Apple has already lined up a new
issuer for the card.

Apple Card is a strange product — everyone I know who has one likes it (including me), but Goldman itself has reported that they’ve lost $3 billion since 2020 on it. The savings accounts are a hit with customers too.

American Express is rumored to be one possible partner, but it would be pretty strange for Apple Cards to transmogrify from MasterCard to Amex cards overnight. There are still a lot of businesses — particularly throughout Europe — that accept MasterCard but not Amex. It’s not just that Apple Card would no longer be accepted at businesses where previously it was, but that would highlight the fact that Apple Card is really just an Apple-branded card issued by a company that isn’t Apple. Apple wants you to think of Apple Card as, well, an Apple credit card.

Read More 

Ian Hickson, who recently left Google after an 18-year stint:

The lack of trust in management is reflected by management no
longer showing trust in the employees either, in the form of inane
corporate policies. In 2004, Google’s founders famously told Wall
Street “Google is not a conventional company. We do not
intend to become one.” but that Google is no more.

Much of these problems with Google today stem from a lack of
visionary leadership from Sundar Pichai, and his clear lack of
interest in maintaining the cultural norms of early Google. A
symptom of this is the spreading contingent of inept middle
management. […]

It’s definitely not too late to heal Google. It would require some
shake-up at the top of the company, moving the centre of power
from the CFO’s office back to someone with a clear long-term
vision for how to use Google’s extensive resources to deliver
value to users. I still believe there’s lots of mileage to be had
from Google’s mission statement (“to organize the world’s
information and make it universally accessible and useful”).
Someone who wanted to lead Google into the next twenty years,
maximising the good to humanity and disregarding the short-term
fluctuations in stock price, could channel the skills and passion
of Google into truly great achievements.

I do think the clock is ticking, though. The deterioration of
Google’s culture will eventually become irreversible, because the
kinds of people whom you need to act as moral compass are the same
kinds of people who don’t join an organisation without a moral
compass.

This jibes with my perception of Google from the outside. Early Google did two things great:

They introduced a steady stream of groundbreaking new products and services that served their mission statement, with broad appeal to the public.
They ruthlessly fought against bloat and feature creep in the products they had already shipped.

Neither of those things has been true in recent years, and the responsibility clearly falls on Pichai.

 ★ 

Ian Hickson, who recently left Google after an 18-year stint:

The lack of trust in management is reflected by management no
longer showing trust in the employees either, in the form of inane
corporate policies. In 2004, Google’s founders famously told Wall
Street “Google is not a conventional company. We do not
intend to become one.” but that Google is no more.

Much of these problems with Google today stem from a lack of
visionary leadership from Sundar Pichai, and his clear lack of
interest in maintaining the cultural norms of early Google. A
symptom of this is the spreading contingent of inept middle
management. […]

It’s definitely not too late to heal Google. It would require some
shake-up at the top of the company, moving the centre of power
from the CFO’s office back to someone with a clear long-term
vision for how to use Google’s extensive resources to deliver
value to users. I still believe there’s lots of mileage to be had
from Google’s mission statement (“to organize the world’s
information and make it universally accessible and useful”).
Someone who wanted to lead Google into the next twenty years,
maximising the good to humanity and disregarding the short-term
fluctuations in stock price, could channel the skills and passion
of Google into truly great achievements.

I do think the clock is ticking, though. The deterioration of
Google’s culture will eventually become irreversible, because the
kinds of people whom you need to act as moral compass are the same
kinds of people who don’t join an organisation without a moral
compass.

This jibes with my perception of Google from the outside. Early Google did two things great:

They introduced a steady stream of groundbreaking new products and services that served their mission statement, with broad appeal to the public.
They ruthlessly fought against bloat and feature creep in the products they had already shipped.

Neither of those things has been true in recent years, and the responsibility clearly falls on Pichai.

Read More 

Maggie Harrison, writing for Futurism:

The only problem? Outside of Sports Illustrated, Drew Ortiz
doesn’t seem to exist. He has no social media presence and no
publishing history. And even more strangely, his profile photo on
Sports Illustrated is for sale on a website that sells
AI-generated headshots, where he’s described as “neutral white
young-adult male with short brown hair and blue eyes.”

Ortiz isn’t the only AI-generated author published by Sports
Illustrated, according to a person involved with the creation of
the content who asked to be kept anonymous to protect them from
professional repercussions. “There’s a lot,” they told us of the
fake authors. “I was like, what are they? This is ridiculous. This
person does not exist.”

“At the bottom [of the page] there would be a photo of a person
and some fake description of them like, ‘oh, John lives in
Houston, Texas. He loves yard games and hanging out with his dog,
Sam.’ Stuff like that,” they continued. “It’s just crazy.”

The AI authors’ writing often sounds like it was written by an
alien; one Ortiz article, for instance, warns that volleyball
“can be a little tricky to get into, especially without an actual
ball to practice with.”

What an incredible fall from grace for what was, for decades, a truly great magazine. I can see how they thought they’d get away with it, though — Sports Illustrated’s human-written articles are now mostly clickbait junk anyway.

 ★ 

Maggie Harrison, writing for Futurism:

The only problem? Outside of Sports Illustrated, Drew Ortiz
doesn’t seem to exist. He has no social media presence and no
publishing history. And even more strangely, his profile photo on
Sports Illustrated is for sale on a website that sells
AI-generated headshots, where he’s described as “neutral white
young-adult male with short brown hair and blue eyes.”

Ortiz isn’t the only AI-generated author published by Sports
Illustrated, according to a person involved with the creation of
the content who asked to be kept anonymous to protect them from
professional repercussions. “There’s a lot,” they told us of the
fake authors. “I was like, what are they? This is ridiculous. This
person does not exist.”

“At the bottom [of the page] there would be a photo of a person
and some fake description of them like, ‘oh, John lives in
Houston, Texas. He loves yard games and hanging out with his dog,
Sam.’ Stuff like that,” they continued. “It’s just crazy.”

The AI authors’ writing often sounds like it was written by an
alien; one Ortiz article, for instance, warns that volleyball
“can be a little tricky to get into, especially without an actual
ball to practice with.”

What an incredible fall from grace for what was, for decades, a truly great magazine. I can see how they thought they’d get away with it, though — Sports Illustrated’s human-written articles are now mostly clickbait junk anyway.

Read More 

Tangentially related to the last item, here’s Eva Rothenberg reporting for CNN:

Since at least 2019, Meta has knowingly refused to shut down the
majority of accounts belonging to children under the age of 13
while collecting their personal information without their parents’
consent, a newly unsealed court document from an ongoing federal
lawsuit against the social media giant alleges. […]

According to the 54-count lawsuit, Meta violated a range of
state-based consumer protection statutes as well as the Children’s
Online Privacy Protection Rule (COPPA), which prohibits companies
from collecting the personal information of children under 13
without a parent’s consent. Meta allegedly did not comply with
COPPA with respect to both Facebook and Instagram, even though
“Meta’s own records reveal that Instagram’s audience composition
includes millions of children under the age of 13,” and that
“hundreds of thousands of teen users spend more than five hours a
day on Instagram,” the court document states.

One Meta product designer wrote in an internal email that the
“young ones are the best ones,” adding that “you want to bring
people to your service young and early,” according to the lawsuit.

Not a good look.

The unsealed complaint also alleges that Meta knew that its
algorithm could steer children toward harmful content, thereby
harming their well-being. According to internal company
communications cited in the document, employees wrote that they
were concerned about “content on IG triggering negative emotions
among tweens and impacting their mental well-being (and) our
ranking algorithms taking [them] into negative spirals & feedback
loops that are hard to exit from.”

On that last point, Jason Kint posted a long thread on Twitter/X highlighting previously redacted details from the lawsuit.

 ★ 

Tangentially related to the last item, here’s Eva Rothenberg reporting for CNN:

Since at least 2019, Meta has knowingly refused to shut down the
majority of accounts belonging to children under the age of 13
while collecting their personal information without their parents’
consent, a newly unsealed court document from an ongoing federal
lawsuit against the social media giant alleges. […]

According to the 54-count lawsuit, Meta violated a range of
state-based consumer protection statutes as well as the Children’s
Online Privacy Protection Rule (COPPA), which prohibits companies
from collecting the personal information of children under 13
without a parent’s consent. Meta allegedly did not comply with
COPPA with respect to both Facebook and Instagram, even though
“Meta’s own records reveal that Instagram’s audience composition
includes millions of children under the age of 13,” and that
“hundreds of thousands of teen users spend more than five hours a
day on Instagram,” the court document states.

One Meta product designer wrote in an internal email that the
“young ones are the best ones,” adding that “you want to bring
people to your service young and early,” according to the lawsuit.

Not a good look.

The unsealed complaint also alleges that Meta knew that its
algorithm could steer children toward harmful content, thereby
harming their well-being. According to internal company
communications cited in the document, employees wrote that they
were concerned about “content on IG triggering negative emotions
among tweens and impacting their mental well-being (and) our
ranking algorithms taking [them] into negative spirals & feedback
loops that are hard to exit from.”

On that last point, Jason Kint posted a long thread on Twitter/X highlighting previously redacted details from the lawsuit.

Read More 

Jeff Horwitz and Katherine Blunt, reporting for The Wall Street Journal:

The Journal sought to determine what Instagram’s Reels algorithm
would recommend to test accounts set up to follow only young
gymnasts, cheerleaders and other teen and preteen influencers
active on the platform. Instagram’s system served jarring doses of
salacious content to those test accounts, including risqué footage
of children as well as overtly sexual adult videos — and ads for
some of the biggest U.S. brands.

The Journal set up the test accounts after observing that the
thousands of followers of such young people’s accounts often
include large numbers of adult men, and that many of the accounts
who followed those children also had demonstrated interest in sex
content related to both children and adults. The Journal also
tested what the algorithm would recommend after its accounts
followed some of those users as well, which produced
more-disturbing content interspersed with ads.

In a stream of videos recommended by Instagram, an ad for the
dating app Bumble appeared between a video of someone stroking the
face of a life-size latex doll and a video of a young girl with a
digitally obscured face lifting up her shirt to expose her
midriff. In another, a Pizza Hut commercial followed a video of a
man lying on a bed with his arm around what the caption said was a
10-year-old girl.

Worse, Meta has known of the Journal’s findings since August and the problem continues:

The Journal informed Meta in August about the results of its
testing. In the months since then, tests by both the Journal and
the Canadian Centre for Child Protection show that the platform
continued to serve up a series of videos featuring young children,
adult content and apparent promotions for child sex material
hosted elsewhere.

As of mid-November, the center said Instagram is continuing to
steadily recommend what the nonprofit described as “adults and
children doing sexual posing.”

There’s no plausible scenario where Instagram wants to cater to pedophiles, but it’s seemingly beyond their current moderation capabilities to determine the content of videos at scale. Solving this ought to be their highest priority.

 ★ 

Jeff Horwitz and Katherine Blunt, reporting for The Wall Street Journal:

The Journal sought to determine what Instagram’s Reels algorithm
would recommend to test accounts set up to follow only young
gymnasts, cheerleaders and other teen and preteen influencers
active on the platform. Instagram’s system served jarring doses of
salacious content to those test accounts, including risqué footage
of children as well as overtly sexual adult videos — and ads for
some of the biggest U.S. brands.

The Journal set up the test accounts after observing that the
thousands of followers of such young people’s accounts often
include large numbers of adult men, and that many of the accounts
who followed those children also had demonstrated interest in sex
content related to both children and adults. The Journal also
tested what the algorithm would recommend after its accounts
followed some of those users as well, which produced
more-disturbing content interspersed with ads.

In a stream of videos recommended by Instagram, an ad for the
dating app Bumble appeared between a video of someone stroking the
face of a life-size latex doll and a video of a young girl with a
digitally obscured face lifting up her shirt to expose her
midriff. In another, a Pizza Hut commercial followed a video of a
man lying on a bed with his arm around what the caption said was a
10-year-old girl.

Worse, Meta has known of the Journal’s findings since August and the problem continues:

The Journal informed Meta in August about the results of its
testing. In the months since then, tests by both the Journal and
the Canadian Centre for Child Protection show that the platform
continued to serve up a series of videos featuring young children,
adult content and apparent promotions for child sex material
hosted elsewhere.

As of mid-November, the center said Instagram is continuing to
steadily recommend what the nonprofit described as “adults and
children doing sexual posing.”

There’s no plausible scenario where Instagram wants to cater to pedophiles, but it’s seemingly beyond their current moderation capabilities to determine the content of videos at scale. Solving this ought to be their highest priority.

Read More 

Rogue Amoeba:

Transcribe can convert speech from an astonishing 57 languages
into text, providing you with a written transcript of any spoken
audio. It’s powered by OpenAI’s automatic speech recognition
system Whisper, and features two powerful models for fast and
accurate transcriptions.

Best of all, unlike traditional transcription services, Transcribe
works for free inside of Audio Hijack. There’s absolutely no
on-going cost, so you can generate unlimited transcriptions and
never again pay a per-minute charge. It’s pretty incredible.

It’s also completely private. When you use Transcribe, everything
happens right on your Mac. That means your data is never sent to
the cloud, nor shared with anyone else.

This makes for a perfect one-two shot with Retrobatch 2: Audio Hijack is also a node-based media tool, and this new Transcribe block is also putting powerful machine learning tools into an easily accessible form.

This Transcribe feature in Audio Hijack is also an exemplar of the power of Apple silicon — it works on Intel-based Macs too, but it’s just incredibly fast on Apple silicon (I suspect because of the Neural Engine on every M-series chip).

 ★ 

Rogue Amoeba:

Transcribe can convert speech from an astonishing 57 languages
into text, providing you with a written transcript of any spoken
audio. It’s powered by OpenAI’s automatic speech recognition
system Whisper, and features two powerful models for fast and
accurate transcriptions.

Best of all, unlike traditional transcription services, Transcribe
works for free inside of Audio Hijack. There’s absolutely no
on-going cost, so you can generate unlimited transcriptions and
never again pay a per-minute charge. It’s pretty incredible.

It’s also completely private. When you use Transcribe, everything
happens right on your Mac. That means your data is never sent to
the cloud, nor shared with anyone else.

This makes for a perfect one-two shot with Retrobatch 2: Audio Hijack is also a node-based media tool, and this new Transcribe block is also putting powerful machine learning tools into an easily accessible form.

This Transcribe feature in Audio Hijack is also an exemplar of the power of Apple silicon — it works on Intel-based Macs too, but it’s just incredibly fast on Apple silicon (I suspect because of the Neural Engine on every M-series chip).

Read More 

Gus Mueller, writing at the Flying Meat blog:

In case you’re not aware, Retrobatch is a node-based batch
image processor, which means you can mix, match, and combine
different operations together to make the perfect workflow. It’s
kind of neat. And version 2 is even neater. […]

Retrobatch is obviously not Flying Meat’s most important app
(Acorn would fill that role), but I really do like working on it
and there’s a bunch more ideas that I want to implement. I feel
like Retrobatch is an app that the Mac needs, and it makes me
incredibly happy to read all the nice letters I get from folks
when they figure out how to use it in their daily work.

Five years after Retrobatch 1 shipped, I’m happy to see version 2
out in the world. And I can’t wait to see what folks are going to
do with it.

“Node-based batch image processor” means that you design and tweak your own image processing workflows not with code, but through a visual drag-and-drop interface. (But you can use code, via nodes for JavaScript, AppleScript, and shell scripts.) You can program your own highly customized image processing workflows without knowing anything about writing code. It’s useful for creating workflows that work on just one image at a time, but Retrobatch really shines for batch processing.

There are a zillion new features in version 2, but the star of the show has to be the new “ML Super Resolution” 4× upscaler: a powerful machine learning model made easily accessible.

 ★ 

Gus Mueller, writing at the Flying Meat blog:

In case you’re not aware, Retrobatch is a node-based batch
image processor, which means you can mix, match, and combine
different operations together to make the perfect workflow. It’s
kind of neat. And version 2 is even neater. […]

Retrobatch is obviously not Flying Meat’s most important app
(Acorn would fill that role), but I really do like working on it
and there’s a bunch more ideas that I want to implement. I feel
like Retrobatch is an app that the Mac needs, and it makes me
incredibly happy to read all the nice letters I get from folks
when they figure out how to use it in their daily work.

Five years after Retrobatch 1 shipped, I’m happy to see version 2
out in the world. And I can’t wait to see what folks are going to
do with it.

“Node-based batch image processor” means that you design and tweak your own image processing workflows not with code, but through a visual drag-and-drop interface. (But you can use code, via nodes for JavaScript, AppleScript, and shell scripts.) You can program your own highly customized image processing workflows without knowing anything about writing code. It’s useful for creating workflows that work on just one image at a time, but Retrobatch really shines for batch processing.

There are a zillion new features in version 2, but the star of the show has to be the new “ML Super Resolution” 4× upscaler: a powerful machine learning model made easily accessible.

Read More 

I can’t read or play music, and struggle even to clap to a beat, so I would have zero use for this device. But I still want to buy one. Just look at it. Absolutely gorgeous.

 ★ 

I can’t read or play music, and struggle even to clap to a beat, so I would have zero use for this device. But I still want to buy one. Just look at it. Absolutely gorgeous.

Read More 

Special guest Gabe Rivera, founder of the indispensable news aggregator Techmeme, joins the show to talk about the state of news and social media. Thanksgiving fun for the entire family — turn the volume down on the Packers-Lions game tomorrow and listen to this instead. (Turn the volume back up, of course, for the Commanders-Cowboys game.)

Sponsored by:

Memberful: Monetize your passion with membership. Start your free trial today.
AdBlock Pro: Block ads in Safari on iPhone, iPad, and Mac.
Squarespace: Use code talkshow to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain.

 ★ 

Special guest Gabe Rivera, founder of the indispensable news aggregator Techmeme, joins the show to talk about the state of news and social media. Thanksgiving fun for the entire family — turn the volume down on the Packers-Lions game tomorrow and listen to this instead. (Turn the volume back up, of course, for the Commanders-Cowboys game.)

Sponsored by:

Memberful: Monetize your passion with membership. Start your free trial today.
AdBlock Pro: Block ads in Safari on iPhone, iPad, and Mac.
Squarespace: Use code talkshow to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain.

Read More 

Nilay Patel and Alex Heath, reporting for The Verge:

Sam Altman will return as CEO of OpenAI, overcoming an attempted
boardroom coup that sent the company into chaos over the
past several days. Former president Greg Brockman, who quit in
protest of Altman’s firing, will return as well.

The company said in a statement late Tuesday that it has an
“agreement in principle” for Altman to return alongside a new
board composed of Bret Taylor, Larry Summers, and Adam D’Angelo.
D’Angelo is a holdover from the previous board that initially
fired Altman on Friday. He remains on this new board to give the
previous board some representation, we’re told.

People familiar with the negotiations say that the main job of
this small initial board is to vet and appoint an expanded board
of up to nine people that will reset the governance of OpenAI.
Microsoft, which has committed to investing billions in the
company, wants to have a seat on that expanded board, as does
Altman himself.

The question I’ve focused on from the start of this soap opera is who really controls OpenAI? The board thought it was them. It wasn’t. Matt Levine had the funniest-because-it’s-true take in his Money Stuff column — I don’t want to spoil it, just go there and look at his “slightly annotated” version of OpenAI’s diagram of their corporate structure.

See also: The Wall Street Journal’s compelling story of the drama behind the scenes (News+ link).

 ★ 

Nilay Patel and Alex Heath, reporting for The Verge:

Sam Altman will return as CEO of OpenAI, overcoming an attempted
boardroom coup that sent the company into chaos over the
past several days. Former president Greg Brockman, who quit in
protest of Altman’s firing, will return as well.

The company said in a statement late Tuesday that it has an
“agreement in principle” for Altman to return alongside a new
board composed of Bret Taylor, Larry Summers, and Adam D’Angelo.
D’Angelo is a holdover from the previous board that initially
fired Altman on Friday. He remains on this new board to give the
previous board some representation, we’re told.

People familiar with the negotiations say that the main job of
this small initial board is to vet and appoint an expanded board
of up to nine people that will reset the governance of OpenAI.
Microsoft, which has committed to investing billions in the
company, wants to have a seat on that expanded board, as does
Altman himself.

The question I’ve focused on from the start of this soap opera is who really controls OpenAI? The board thought it was them. It wasn’t. Matt Levine had the funniest-because-it’s-true take in his Money Stuff column — I don’t want to spoil it, just go there and look at his “slightly annotated” version of OpenAI’s diagram of their corporate structure.

See also: The Wall Street Journal’s compelling story of the drama behind the scenes (News+ link).

Read More