Fascinating essay by Nikhil Suresh:

On a trip overseas, I had the privilege of a meeting with one of the Fortune 500 executives mentioned at the beginning of the post, who will remain anonymous so that they are not executed by firing squad by their board. As we were chatting, it became clear that they were very switched-on and technically competent, and they also happened to be at a company that had committed to the usual battery of exorbitant claims about their recent innovations — we’ve 100×’d our productivity, AI is the future of everything, I am but a vessel for OpenAI to make love to my wife. You know, normal things. But since I had them there without any microphones around, I asked why this was being repeated without opposition. Was it just sales fluff?

The answer was a lot more interesting. It was partially ridiculous sales material being delivered to an easily excitable audience, but this was not the dominant factor constraining honesty. Executives at their customers were saying absurd things about achieving 100× productivity, and this meant that if any executive at the vendor said that these gains were not plausible, it would undermine the credibility of the customer’s executive, be perceived as an attack (or heresy), and possibly result in an enterprise contract cancellation. And getting enterprise contracts cancelled because you wanted to opine on something that doesn’t really matter to your organisation’s mission is a great way to get fired.

The whole essay is very much worth reading, and might make you feel saner for harboring your own doubts regarding just how much has been changed in the world by generative AI. The gist of his argument is that the entire corporate world — not merely the computer/tech industry — is caught up in an AI mania that brooks no dissent. It’s a religious fervor and heretics are excommunicated. But the dissenters, who feel they must remain silent, are largely correct.

One way I’ve been thinking about AI mania is this: Computers have profoundly changed the world. There can be no dispute about that. Computers continue to improve in capability as networking effects grow and especially as Moore’s Law makes them faster and more capable at a pace unlike any other previous technical revolution. But most people are incapable of understanding how computers really work, and thus personally aren’t able to do much with them. Computers, for most people, are communication tools, not creative tools. Generative AI changes that. People with no computer aptitude are able to create things or discover things via ChatGPT and Claude that were simply beyond their ken heretofore. Per Clarke’s third law, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. Generative AI feels a bit magical to all of us, even those of us with mid-to-high levels of understanding how computers work and how to make them work. But it feels like the first time ever that computers have been tools for their own creation for a lot of rather dimwitted but confident corporate manager/executive types. This moment feels like the Big Bang to them. The religiosity of this is such that there is no way to convince them that AI, as it stands today, is impressive and useful and innovative, yes, but several orders of magnitude less so than they’re imagining that it is. No way to convince them, that is, until the bubble bursts.

The European Commission on Thursday:

The Commission found that Google gives preferential treatment to its own services, including shopping, hotels, transport and sports results, over those of third parties in Google Search, thereby breaching its obligations under the DMA.

Google displays its own services more prominently in search results, including at the top of the search results page or by using enhanced visuals and filters, while similar third-party services do not have the same prominence.

So if you search for the score of a sporting event, it’s illegal in the EU for Google to show you the score, like this search I just tried. What the EC is saying is that because Google Search is so popular, it’s no longer allowed to improve. It is impossible to imagine how this benefits EU citizens.

What generates more for the EU, fines against US tech companies, or tax income from EU tech companies? Here’s a viral post on Twitter/X that claims it’s now fines against US tech companies. The amounts certainly seem to be in the same ballpark.

Julien Khaleghy, CEO of SerpApi:

The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California granted our motion to dismiss Google’s lawsuit, marking a win not just for SerpApi, but for all who depend on an open internet. We’re pleased that the court rejected Google’s attempts to expand the DMCA to assert control over access to public pages. The internet’s founding principle — open access to usable information — is essential to driving innovation and ensuring everyone benefits from the promise of data. SerpApi will continue supporting developers, AI companies, researchers, and businesses that rely on access to public search information.

Yours truly, back in March, when SerpApi filed the motion to dismiss:

I’ve come around on SerpApi in the last few months. My initial take was that it surely must be illegal for a company to scrape Google’s search results and offer access to that data as an API. But I’ve come around to the argument that what SerpApi is doing to obtain Google search results is, well, exactly how Google scrapes the rest of the entire web to build its search index. It’s all just scraping publicly accessible web pages.

This December piece by Mike Masnick at Techdirt is what began to change my mind.

Even Google seems to understand the logical bind they’re in here, regarding scraping.

Apple Newsroom:

Apple and Ford today announced that Apple Maps will be integrated directly into Ford’s upcoming Universal Electric Vehicle (UEV) Platform through Apple’s new MapKit for Automotive SDK. Coming to Ford’s UEV Platform in 2027, this integration will deliver a beautiful and easy-to-use navigation experience powered by Apple Maps directly to the vehicle’s displays. Road-level Maps information will also enable Ford’s Latitude AI team to build a seamless hands-free driving experience.

See also: Techmeme’s roundup of commentary.

Teddy Rosenbluth, reporting for The New York Times:

On Friday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced that there have been 2,318 confirmed cases of measles so far this year. The case count toppled the record set last year, when measles infected more than 2,200 Americans and killed two unvaccinated children. More measles cases have been reported in the United States in the last two years than in all the years from 2000 through 2024 combined.

Reversing course on measles would require a nationwide push to improve vaccination rates, a prospect that experts said seemed unlikely under the leadership of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. He has halted funding for vaccine hesitancy research, downplayed the risks of measles and spearheaded a hunt for evidence that vaccines are unsafe.

Nilay Patel, endorsing Kamala Harris for president in 2024: “A Vote for Donald Trump Is a Vote for School Shootings and Measles”. (He missed “quagmire war with Iran”.)

“tarltontarlton” on Reddit last year: “Stupid-Americans are the New Irish-Americans, Trump is Their JFK”. I continue to think about this post frequently.

Isaac Asimov, in a column for Newsweek in 1980:

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge”.

I continue to think about this frequently as well.

For a long time the best native Mac IRC client was Textual, but although Textual still works, it’s been sunset by the author. Not to fear, however. Fredrik Blank just launched bIRC:

Creating an IRC client in 2026 is not something that will pay the bills : ) It would be just for the joy of programming. But the amount of work involved always made me throw the thought aside.

But one night when I had nothing better to do, I started implementing the good old spec in Swift (RFC 2812). And then I got motivated to continue, adding IRCv3 extensions and UI. Been working on it on and off on it since the end of 2025. Now I feel pretty satisfied with the result. Say hi to bIRC — an IRCv3 client for Mac.

I was never a big IRC user, personally, and haven’t used IRC in years. But I installed bIRC just because it looks so good, and took it for a brief test drive. It’s nice. And it is very Mac-assed in a modern way. It’s got a detailed documentation page too. There are (alas) many great apps that lack good documentation, but there are very few apps with good documentation that aren’t great apps. bIRC is free to download and use from the App Store, and there’s a suite of additional fun/pro features you can unlock for a one-time $13 purchase. I bought the pro upgrade despite seldom using IRC just to celebrate a killer new Mac app.

Following up on the previous item today, re: content blockers and ad-blocking, I ran into a weird situation a few weeks ago with my column “John Ternus Should Reverse Apple’s Slide Down the Advertising Slippery Slope”. That article contains this sentence, in Markdown:

And -- at this writing, still "coming soon" -- Apple is
launching [ads on Apple Maps][🗺️].

[🗺️]: https://ads.apple.com/maps

The problem is that anyone reading that article in NetNewsWire saw it rendered like this, with the words “ads on Apple Maps”¹ omitted:

It looks like I forgot to finish writing that sentence. NetNewsWire simply omits the hyperlinked words. After a few readers reported this, I immediately suspected the problem was the “ads.apple.com” domain. I’ve never linked to that domain before, and many ad blockers just block any domain that starts with a domain prefix like ads.*.

And that’s exactly what the problem is. I had no idea that NetNewsWire filtered any content whatsoever (and I sort of think it shouldn’t), but DF reader Antonio Germano searched through NetNewsWire’s open-source code and found it in the core.css file, line 49:

38  /*Block ads and junk*/
39  
40  iframe[src*="feedads" ],
41  iframe[src*="doubleclick"],
42  iframe[src*="plusone.google"] {
43      display: none !important;
44  }
45  
46  a[href*=".ads."],
47  a[href*="feedads" ],
48  a[href*="doubleclick"],
49  a[href*="//ads."],

The culprit identified, I dutifully pinged my friend Brent Simmons to report the problem. But then I had to decide what to do about it. I have no idea which feed readers are being used to read Daring Fireball’s feeds, but NetNewsWire is surely one of the most popular, and probably the most popular. It’s the feed reader I use personally. I can’t change the contents of NetNewsWire’s core.css file, so I can’t keep NetNewsWire from stripping out words that link to Apple’s ads.apple.com domain. What I could do is not link to ads.apple.com, like, say by changing my link from ads.apple.com/maps to a shorten-and-redirect URL like bit.ly/4wmXFSE that points back to Apple’s original URL.

But I didn’t do that. I don’t like playing whack-a-mole to work around bugs in other software. I have enough trouble fixing my own mistakes. I also don’t like the idea of showing everyone a “Click it and find out where it actually goes” mystery URL from Bitly rather than the direct URL. It’s a general principle thing, and also a much better policy for links that are meant to last for decades.

What I really don’t like about NetNewsWire’s ad-blocking here is that it just omits the linked text. It doesn’t remove the link but leave the words; it removes the words that are hyperlinked to the blocked domain. I’ve run into this with other content blocking extensions. For example, the Banish extension for Safari, which I recommended back in 2022. At some point a year or two ago, Banish started blocking links to Apple’s App Store domain, and it did so by removing the words that link to the App Store. That’s crazy. I linked to the App Store in my own post recommending Banish, which means if you have Banish installed and read that post, you won’t see the headline of the post (nor be able to follow the link). I think there are other content blockers that do the same thing with text that links to the App Store.²

So what do I do about that? Do I stop linking to the App Store? That’s dumb. Do I create custom URL redirects for every single link I make to the App Store? That’s work I don’t need or want to do, and adds a layer of abstraction that confuses everyone who isn’t using a content blocker with such a stupid rule. So I just ignore it. But that means an untold number of readers, who are using such content blockers, are just missing words in my articles whenever I link to the App Store. Well, so be it. Ideally, content blockers “just work” — blocking only things you want blocked, never things you don’t want blocked. Nothing is perfect however. What’s pernicious about blockers that remove the actual words that link to certain domains is that that’s not expected behavior. From the reader’s perspective, it really just looks like an editing error on the part of the website, not a content blocker with an overzealous pattern-matching rule.

Ultimately, though, when you install a content blocker extension, you take responsibility for any overzealousness in what it blocks.

Let me use this opportunity to make a small personal request. The display ads on Daring Fireball are unobtrusive and limited to one per page. They are also entirely private, and always have been. There not only are no cookies or JavaScript that attempt to track you, but the ads themselves are served from the daringfireball.net domain. I turn down advertisers who request to serve images (or “tracking pixels”, which are just invisible images) from their domains. (Such requests are infrequent, thankfully.) I don’t display the ads in between paragraphs mid-article, a common practice that to me is disrespectful both to the writer and reader. In short, I try to keep the ads on Daring Fireball not merely unobjectionable, but something that actually adds to the site. I actually like the ads in certain high-quality print magazines, like The New Yorker. My goal for the ads on DF is for them to be like that.

In short, I hope they’re the sort of ads readers don’t want to block. I’m pleased to say that most of the ad-blocking content blocking extensions I’ve personally tried do not block ads on Daring Fireball by default. In other cases, they do, but it’s easy to adjust the per-domain settings to allow them. In the previous post, I recommended uBlock Origin Lite (free, a bit complex) and Magic Lasso (paid, much simpler). Magic Lasso does not block ads on DF by default. I don’t remember what uBlock Origin does by default, but it’s trivial to change it to allow them.

If you use an ad blocker and it currently blocks the ads on DF, I humbly ask you to consider taking a moment to tweak the settings to permit them. (If you are using a blocker that strips the ads from DF by default, you can do me an additional favor and shoot me a short email telling me which one. I’m curious.) If you are the developer of an ad blocker, I ask you to consider allowlisting Daring Fireball by default.

If you are a reader and you really do want to block DF’s ads, please, go right ahead. I find that an odd mindset, but it’s your web browser and your call. No hard feelings. (Please further note that I have no JavaScript code that attempts to detect whether you’re blocking DF’s ads in order to nag you.)