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Ian King, Liana Baker, and Ryan Gould, reporting for Bloomberg:*

Intel Corp. Chief Executive Officer Pat Gelsinger was forced out
after the board lost confidence in his plans to turn around the
iconic chipmaker, adding to turmoil at one of the pioneers of the
technology industry.

The clash came to a head last week when Gelsinger met with the
board about the company’s progress on winning back market share
and narrowing the gap with Nvidia Corp., according to people
familiar with the matter. He was given the option to retire or be
removed, and chose to announce the end of his career at Intel,
said the people, who declined to be identified discussing
proceedings that were not made public.

Intel Chief Financial Officer David Zinsner and Michelle Johnston
Holthaus are serving as interim co-CEOs while the board searches
for Gelsinger’s replacement, the company said in a statement.
Frank Yeary, independent chair of the board of Intel, will serve
as interim executive chair.

See also: Techmeme’s roundup.

* Bloomberg, of course, is the publication that published “The Big Hack” in October 2018 — a sensational story alleging that data centers of Apple, Amazon, and dozens of other companies were compromised by China’s intelligence services. The story presented no confirmable evidence at all, was vehemently denied by all companies involved, has not been confirmed by a single other publication (despite much effort to do so), and has been largely discredited by one of Bloomberg’s own sources. By all appearances “The Big Hack” was complete bullshit. Yet Bloomberg has issued no correction or retraction, and their only ostensibly substantial follow-up contained not one shred of evidence to back up their allegations. Bloomberg seemingly hopes we’ll all just forget about it. I say we do not just forget about it. Everything they publish should be treated with skepticism until they retract “The Big Hack” or provide evidence that any of it was true.

 ★ 

Ian King, Liana Baker, and Ryan Gould, reporting for Bloomberg:*

Intel Corp. Chief Executive Officer Pat Gelsinger was forced out
after the board lost confidence in his plans to turn around the
iconic chipmaker, adding to turmoil at one of the pioneers of the
technology industry.

The clash came to a head last week when Gelsinger met with the
board about the company’s progress on winning back market share
and narrowing the gap with Nvidia Corp., according to people
familiar with the matter. He was given the option to retire or be
removed, and chose to announce the end of his career at Intel,
said the people, who declined to be identified discussing
proceedings that were not made public.

Intel Chief Financial Officer David Zinsner and Michelle Johnston
Holthaus are serving as interim co-CEOs while the board searches
for Gelsinger’s replacement, the company said in a statement.
Frank Yeary, independent chair of the board of Intel, will serve
as interim executive chair.

See also: Techmeme’s roundup.

* Bloomberg, of course, is the publication that published “The Big Hack” in October 2018 — a sensational story alleging that data centers of Apple, Amazon, and dozens of other companies were compromised by China’s intelligence services. The story presented no confirmable evidence at all, was vehemently denied by all companies involved, has not been confirmed by a single other publication (despite much effort to do so), and has been largely discredited by one of Bloomberg’s own sources. By all appearances “The Big Hack” was complete bullshit. Yet Bloomberg has issued no correction or retraction, and their only ostensibly substantial follow-up contained not one shred of evidence to back up their allegations. Bloomberg seemingly hopes we’ll all just forget about it. I say we do not just forget about it. Everything they publish should be treated with skepticism until they retract “The Big Hack” or provide evidence that any of it was true.

Read More 

Cal Paterson:

Large language models (LLMs) like Chat-GPT and Claude.ai are
whizzy and cool. A lot of people think that they are going to be
The Future. Maybe they are — but that doesn’t mean that building
them is going to be a profitable business.

In the 1960s, airlines were The Future. That is why old films have
so many swish shots of airports in them. Airlines though, turned
out to be an unavoidably rubbish business. I’ve flown on loads of
airlines that have gone bust: Monarch, WOW Air, Thomas Cook,
Flybmi, Zoom. And those are all busts from before coronavirus –
times change but being an airline is always a bad idea.

That’s odd, because other businesses, even ones which seem really
stupid, are much more profitable. Selling fizzy drinks is,
surprisingly, an amazing business. Perhaps the best. Coca-Cola’s
return on equity has rarely fallen below 30% in any given year.
That seems very unfair because being an airline is hard work but
making Coke is pretty easy. It’s even more galling because
Coca-Cola don’t actually make the Coke themselves – that is
outsourced to “bottling companies”. They literally just sell it.

This is such a crackerjack essay. Clear, concise, and uncomplicated. I find it hard to argue with. I’ve repeatedly mentioned an internal paper that leaked out of Google last year, titled “We Have No Moat, and Neither Does OpenAI”. The fact that OpenAI has lobbied for stringent AI regulation around the globe suggests that they fear this too — their encouragement of regulation could be explained by seeking a regulatory moat because there is no technical or business model moat to be had.

Paterson, expounding on his comparison to the airline industry, observes that commercial airlines have only two suppliers: Boeing and Airbus. He continues:

LLM makers sometimes imply that their suppliers are cloud
companies like Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, etc. That
wouldn’t be so bad because you could shop around and make them
compete to cut the huge cost of model training.

Really though, LLM makers have only one true supplier:
NVIDIA. NVIDIA make the chips that all models are
trained on — regardless of cloud vendor. And that gives
NVIDIA colossal, near total pricing power. NVIDIA are more
powerful relative to Anthropic or OpenAI than Airbus or
Boeing could ever dream of being.

At this moment, there are three companies in the world with market caps in excess of $3 trillion: Apple, Nvidia, and Microsoft. There are only two more with market caps in excess of $2 trillion: Amazon and Google. Engineering, training, and providing LLMs isn’t the business with a moat. The business with a moat is making the cutting-edge computer hardware that trains LLMs, and that belongs to Nvidia.

I have more to say about Paterson’s essay, but I really just want you to read it for now.

 ★ 

Cal Paterson:

Large language models (LLMs) like Chat-GPT and Claude.ai are
whizzy and cool. A lot of people think that they are going to be
The Future. Maybe they are — but that doesn’t mean that building
them is going to be a profitable business.

In the 1960s, airlines were The Future. That is why old films have
so many swish shots of airports in them. Airlines though, turned
out to be an unavoidably rubbish business. I’ve flown on loads of
airlines that have gone bust: Monarch, WOW Air, Thomas Cook,
Flybmi, Zoom. And those are all busts from before coronavirus –
times change but being an airline is always a bad idea.

That’s odd, because other businesses, even ones which seem really
stupid, are much more profitable. Selling fizzy drinks is,
surprisingly, an amazing business. Perhaps the best. Coca-Cola’s
return on equity has rarely fallen below 30% in any given year.
That seems very unfair because being an airline is hard work but
making Coke is pretty easy. It’s even more galling because
Coca-Cola don’t actually make the Coke themselves – that is
outsourced to “bottling companies”. They literally just sell it.

This is such a crackerjack essay. Clear, concise, and uncomplicated. I find it hard to argue with. I’ve repeatedly mentioned an internal paper that leaked out of Google last year, titled “We Have No Moat, and Neither Does OpenAI”. The fact that OpenAI has lobbied for stringent AI regulation around the globe suggests that they fear this too — their encouragement of regulation could be explained by seeking a regulatory moat because there is no technical or business model moat to be had.

Paterson, expounding on his comparison to the airline industry, observes that commercial airlines have only two suppliers: Boeing and Airbus. He continues:

LLM makers sometimes imply that their suppliers are cloud
companies like Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, etc. That
wouldn’t be so bad because you could shop around and make them
compete to cut the huge cost of model training.

Really though, LLM makers have only one true supplier:
NVIDIA. NVIDIA make the chips that all models are
trained on — regardless of cloud vendor. And that gives
NVIDIA colossal, near total pricing power. NVIDIA are more
powerful relative to Anthropic or OpenAI than Airbus or
Boeing could ever dream of being.

At this moment, there are three companies in the world with market caps in excess of $3 trillion: Apple, Nvidia, and Microsoft. There are only two more with market caps in excess of $2 trillion: Amazon and Google. Engineering, training, and providing LLMs isn’t the business with a moat. The business with a moat is making the cutting-edge computer hardware that trains LLMs, and that belongs to Nvidia.

I have more to say about Paterson’s essay, but I really just want you to read it for now.

Read More 

Kind of wild that this entire sub-site is still standing on Apple.com, including working video. (Fingers crossed that my linking to it doesn’t bring it to the attention of someone who decides to 404 it.)

 ★ 

Kind of wild that this entire sub-site is still standing on Apple.com, including working video. (Fingers crossed that my linking to it doesn’t bring it to the attention of someone who decides to 404 it.)

Read More 

From Nathan Edwards’s 6/10 review of the M4 iMac for The Verge:

I also do not love that the stand has no height adjustment, and
you can’t swap it for a more ergonomic option without buying an
entirely different computer. Apple sells a version of the iMac
with a VESA mount, but it doesn’t come with a stand at all,
and most height-adjustable VESA mounts are not as pretty as the
iMac. The Studio Display has a height-adjustable stand option, so
we know Apple can make one it’s willing to put out into the
world. It just hasn’t done so here. But whatever. I have hardcover
books. It’s fine.

It wasn’t Edwards, but Nilay Patel, who reviewed the Studio Display for The Verge, but in that review the $1,600 cost — which called out the $400 surcharge for the optional adjustable stand — was one of the three bullet items under “The Bad”. So it’s not hard to guess that if the M4 iMac had an optional adjustable stand, it would still be listed a con, because surely that option, from Apple, would cost at least $300.

(I’ve used a Studio Display with the pricey options for nano-texture and adjustable height ever since it came out, and consider both options well worth the cost.)

But the weird thing about Edwards’s review is that the whole thing is predicated on his not seeing the appeal of an all-in-one computer. I feel the same way, personally. My primary computer is a MacBook Pro that I connect, lid-closed, to the aforementioned-in-parenthetical-aside Studio Display most of the time. If I were to buy a dedicated desktop Mac I’d get either a Mac Mini or Mac Studio and connect that to a Studio Display. But the iMac is obviously intended for people who want an all-in-one.

It makes for a very strange, dare I say pointless, review. It’s like a bicycle review from someone who admits that they only ever walk or drive a car and don’t see why anyone else doesn’t walk or drive everywhere. In theory, someone who doesn’t care for genre X can write a review of something from genre X, and their dislike of the genre might provide a unique perspective. (David Foster Wallace wrote a masterpiece of the genre with the title essay in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again regarding a weeklong Caribbean cruise.) But the review still needs to gauge the product accordingly, for what it is. Does anyone make a better all-in-one PC than the iMac? If so, who? If not, why is this a 6/10?

 ★ 

From Nathan Edwards’s 6/10 review of the M4 iMac for The Verge:

I also do not love that the stand has no height adjustment, and
you can’t swap it for a more ergonomic option without buying an
entirely different computer. Apple sells a version of the iMac
with a VESA mount, but it doesn’t come with a stand at all,
and most height-adjustable VESA mounts are not as pretty as the
iMac. The Studio Display has a height-adjustable stand option, so
we know Apple can make one it’s willing to put out into the
world. It just hasn’t done so here. But whatever. I have hardcover
books. It’s fine.

It wasn’t Edwards, but Nilay Patel, who reviewed the Studio Display for The Verge, but in that review the $1,600 cost — which called out the $400 surcharge for the optional adjustable stand — was one of the three bullet items under “The Bad”. So it’s not hard to guess that if the M4 iMac had an optional adjustable stand, it would still be listed a con, because surely that option, from Apple, would cost at least $300.

(I’ve used a Studio Display with the pricey options for nano-texture and adjustable height ever since it came out, and consider both options well worth the cost.)

But the weird thing about Edwards’s review is that the whole thing is predicated on his not seeing the appeal of an all-in-one computer. I feel the same way, personally. My primary computer is a MacBook Pro that I connect, lid-closed, to the aforementioned-in-parenthetical-aside Studio Display most of the time. If I were to buy a dedicated desktop Mac I’d get either a Mac Mini or Mac Studio and connect that to a Studio Display. But the iMac is obviously intended for people who want an all-in-one.

It makes for a very strange, dare I say pointless, review. It’s like a bicycle review from someone who admits that they only ever walk or drive a car and don’t see why anyone else doesn’t walk or drive everywhere. In theory, someone who doesn’t care for genre X can write a review of something from genre X, and their dislike of the genre might provide a unique perspective. (David Foster Wallace wrote a masterpiece of the genre with the title essay in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again regarding a weeklong Caribbean cruise.) But the review still needs to gauge the product accordingly, for what it is. Does anyone make a better all-in-one PC than the iMac? If so, who? If not, why is this a 6/10?

Read More 

Holiday shopping bundle of 13 excellent Mac Apps, with two ways to buy. Get the whole bundle of 13 apps for $74 (a 76 percent discount from the combined regular prices), or, pick and choose a la carte and buy apps at 50 percent off.

Included in the promotion is Stairways Software’s astonishingly powerful and useful Keyboard Maestro, which almost never goes on sale. There are many longstanding Mac apps and utilities that I enjoy, appreciate, and recommend. There are very few that I can say I’d feel lost without. Keyboard Maestro is one of those.

Other apps in the Space/Time bundle that I use: TextSniper (instantly OCR any text you see on screen), DaisyDisk (disk space visualizer/cleanup), CleanShot X (advanced screenshot utility), and Bartender (menu bar item manager).

 ★ 

Holiday shopping bundle of 13 excellent Mac Apps, with two ways to buy. Get the whole bundle of 13 apps for $74 (a 76 percent discount from the combined regular prices), or, pick and choose a la carte and buy apps at 50 percent off.

Included in the promotion is Stairways Software’s astonishingly powerful and useful Keyboard Maestro, which almost never goes on sale. There are many longstanding Mac apps and utilities that I enjoy, appreciate, and recommend. There are very few that I can say I’d feel lost without. Keyboard Maestro is one of those.

Other apps in the Space/Time bundle that I use: TextSniper (instantly OCR any text you see on screen), DaisyDisk (disk space visualizer/cleanup), CleanShot X (advanced screenshot utility), and Bartender (menu bar item manager).

Read More 

Fun interaction design treatise from George Cave.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

 ★ 

Fun interaction design treatise from George Cave.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

Read More 

Borderline incredible discount on AirPods Pro 2 at Amazon. This is just short of $100 off the retail list price of $249. (Buy through this link and I’ll get rich on the affiliate commission.)

 ★ 

Borderline incredible discount on AirPods Pro 2 at Amazon. This is just short of $100 off the retail list price of $249. (Buy through this link and I’ll get rich on the affiliate commission.)

Read More 

John Siracusa, in his inimitable style, reviewed Delicious Library 1.0 upon its release, 20 years ago this month:

Part of what makes the Mac community so special is that so many
Mac developers have itches — and, more importantly, corresponding
talents — that have little or nothing to do with computers. I
invite you to look again at some of the screenshots and artwork in
this application. Someone loved those graphics. Someone sweated
over every pixel of that application window. Someone knows what it
means to be a lover of art, music, books, video games. This is in
addition to (not instead of) the ability to write great code.

All of these human facilities and experiences have been harnessed
to create not just a mere “program”, “application” or (God forbid)
“executable”, but a digital love letter to collectors. Delicious
Monster, from its products to its web site, exudes a
spirit of passion and fun. “I’ve never been happier at work”, Wil
Shipley told me in an email. “I think it shows in the finished
product.”

I think so too. It may only be version 1.0, but it’s delicious.

Re-reading this review — which I first linked to, with little comment, upon publication — reminded me of several things. First, Siracusa is one of the few writers I’ve ever felt competitive with in this racket. This whole thing is so fucking good, and touches upon so many subtle points that are so hard to convey in words. (In some ways it’s better to read in its original multi-page layout, via Internet Archive, but those archived versions are inexplicably missing some, but not all, of the screenshots, and for a review of an app as visually ambitious as Delicious Library, the screenshots are essential. But the current Ars Technica version of the review, although it has all the inline images, is missing this “larger version” of Delicious Library’s main window. Open the version I’m hosting in a tab for reference. Note too that “larger version” meant something different 20 years ago — it’s only 183 KB, but is the largest image in the review.)

Second, I had forgotten just how ambitious Delicious Library 1.0 was, right out of the gate. I remembered that Delicious Library eventually supported barcode scanning via webcams, but that feature was in fact present in version 1.0. It worked incredibly well. And the feature was so far ahead of its time. In 2004, no Mac had yet shipped with a built-in camera. Instead, we all bought Apple’s standalone $150 iSight camera, which connected via FireWire. (What a gorgeous device.) By the end of his effusive review, Siracusa (unsurprisingly) has a wishlist of additional features, but what was in Delicious Library 1.0 comprised far more than a “minimal viable product”. It exemplified Apple’s — and Steve Jobs’s — own ethos of debuting with a bang, right out of the gate. It made you say “Wow!” And then you’d think, “Oh, but it’d be cool if it…” and, it turns out, it did that too.

Delicious indeed.

 ★ 

John Siracusa, in his inimitable style, reviewed Delicious Library 1.0 upon its release, 20 years ago this month:

Part of what makes the Mac community so special is that so many
Mac developers have itches — and, more importantly, corresponding
talents — that have little or nothing to do with computers. I
invite you to look again at some of the screenshots and artwork in
this application. Someone loved those graphics. Someone sweated
over every pixel of that application window. Someone knows what it
means to be a lover of art, music, books, video games. This is in
addition to (not instead of) the ability to write great code.

All of these human facilities and experiences have been harnessed
to create not just a mere “program”, “application” or (God forbid)
“executable”, but a digital love letter to collectors. Delicious
Monster, from its products to its web site, exudes a
spirit of passion and fun. “I’ve never been happier at work”, Wil
Shipley told me in an email. “I think it shows in the finished
product.”

I think so too. It may only be version 1.0, but it’s delicious.

Re-reading this review — which I first linked to, with little comment, upon publication — reminded me of several things. First, Siracusa is one of the few writers I’ve ever felt competitive with in this racket. This whole thing is so fucking good, and touches upon so many subtle points that are so hard to convey in words. (In some ways it’s better to read in its original multi-page layout, via Internet Archive, but those archived versions are inexplicably missing some, but not all, of the screenshots, and for a review of an app as visually ambitious as Delicious Library, the screenshots are essential. But the current Ars Technica version of the review, although it has all the inline images, is missing this “larger version” of Delicious Library’s main window. Open the version I’m hosting in a tab for reference. Note too that “larger version” meant something different 20 years ago — it’s only 183 KB, but is the largest image in the review.)

Second, I had forgotten just how ambitious Delicious Library 1.0 was, right out of the gate. I remembered that Delicious Library eventually supported barcode scanning via webcams, but that feature was in fact present in version 1.0. It worked incredibly well. And the feature was so far ahead of its time. In 2004, no Mac had yet shipped with a built-in camera. Instead, we all bought Apple’s standalone $150 iSight camera, which connected via FireWire. (What a gorgeous device.) By the end of his effusive review, Siracusa (unsurprisingly) has a wishlist of additional features, but what was in Delicious Library 1.0 comprised far more than a “minimal viable product”. It exemplified Apple’s — and Steve Jobs’s — own ethos of debuting with a bang, right out of the gate. It made you say “Wow!” And then you’d think, “Oh, but it’d be cool if it…” and, it turns out, it did that too.

Delicious indeed.

Read More 

Wil Shipley, on Mastodon:

Amazon has shut off the feed that allowed Delicious Library to
look up items, unfortunately limiting the app to what users
already have (or enter manually).

I wasn’t contacted about this.

I’ve pulled it from the Mac App Store and shut down the website so
nobody accidentally buys a non-functional app.

The end of an era, but it’s kind of surprising it was still functional until now. (Shipley has been a full-time engineer at Apple for three years now.)

It’s hard to describe just what a sensation Delicious Library was when it debuted, and how influential it was. Delicious Library was simultaneously very useful, in very practical ways, and obsessed with its exuberant UI in ways that served no purpose other than looking cool as shit. It was an app that demanded to be praised just for the way it looked, but also served a purpose that resonated with many users. For about a decade it seemed as though most popular new apps would be designed like Delicious Library. Then Apple dropped iOS 7 in 2013, and now, no apps look like this. Whatever it is that we, as an industry, have lost in the now decade-long trend of iOS 7-style flat design, Delicious Library epitomized it.

They were even clever and innovative in the ways they promoted the app. The first time Delicious Monster sponsored Daring Fireball for a week, their sponsorship message read, in its entirety:

Organize the shit you like.
Get rid of the shit you don’t.
Delicious Library 2.

When they created an iPhone version of Delicious Library, they announced it via this delightfully intricate but decidedly lo-fi stop-motion-animated video.

20 years go by and there’s some inevitable nostalgia looking back at any art form. But man, Delicious Library exemplified an era of indie app development that, sadly, is largely over. And make no bones about it: Delicious Library was a creative work of art.

 ★ 

Wil Shipley, on Mastodon:

Amazon has shut off the feed that allowed Delicious Library to
look up items, unfortunately limiting the app to what users
already have (or enter manually).

I wasn’t contacted about this.

I’ve pulled it from the Mac App Store and shut down the website so
nobody accidentally buys a non-functional app.

The end of an era, but it’s kind of surprising it was still functional until now. (Shipley has been a full-time engineer at Apple for three years now.)

It’s hard to describe just what a sensation Delicious Library was when it debuted, and how influential it was. Delicious Library was simultaneously very useful, in very practical ways, and obsessed with its exuberant UI in ways that served no purpose other than looking cool as shit. It was an app that demanded to be praised just for the way it looked, but also served a purpose that resonated with many users. For about a decade it seemed as though most popular new apps would be designed like Delicious Library. Then Apple dropped iOS 7 in 2013, and now, no apps look like this. Whatever it is that we, as an industry, have lost in the now decade-long trend of iOS 7-style flat design, Delicious Library epitomized it.

They were even clever and innovative in the ways they promoted the app. The first time Delicious Monster sponsored Daring Fireball for a week, their sponsorship message read, in its entirety:

Organize the shit you like.
Get rid of the shit you don’t.
Delicious Library 2.

When they created an iPhone version of Delicious Library, they announced it via this delightfully intricate but decidedly lo-fi stop-motion-animated video.

20 years go by and there’s some inevitable nostalgia looking back at any art form. But man, Delicious Library exemplified an era of indie app development that, sadly, is largely over. And make no bones about it: Delicious Library was a creative work of art.

Read More 

The Onion Editorial Board:

All great journalists, and even those lesser journalists who don’t
work for The Onion, eventually ponder why we do what we do. Is the
point of reporting to illuminate the world around us, so that we
may make meaning of it? Or is it to cause people in minority
groups to question their humanity and persuade others to demonize
them? We know where we stand, proudly dreaming of genitals.

Research shows that trans people are over four times more likely
than cisgender people to be the victim of a violent crime. We
salute our colleagues across the media who are working tirelessly
to make that number even higher.

This was published in 2023, but seems particularly apt post-election.

 ★ 

The Onion Editorial Board:

All great journalists, and even those lesser journalists who don’t
work for The Onion, eventually ponder why we do what we do. Is the
point of reporting to illuminate the world around us, so that we
may make meaning of it? Or is it to cause people in minority
groups to question their humanity and persuade others to demonize
them? We know where we stand, proudly dreaming of genitals.

Research shows that trans people are over four times more likely
than cisgender people to be the victim of a violent crime. We
salute our colleagues across the media who are working tirelessly
to make that number even higher.

This was published in 2023, but seems particularly apt post-election.

Read More