Hannah Murphy, reporting for the Financial Times (paywalled, but Ars Technica has a no-paywall syndicated copy):

The company recently began prioritising a Zuckerberg AI character, three of the people said.

The Meta chief is personally involved in training and testing his animated AI, which could offer conversation and feedback to employees, according to one person. They added that the character is being trained on the billionaire’s mannerisms, tone and publicly available statements, as well as his own recent thinking on company strategies, so that employees might feel more connected to the founder through interactions with it.

This is so straight out of every dystopian sci-fi film about an evil corporation that it’s hard to believe.

Top comment on Hacker News, from “flibbityflob”:

How will a machine ever replace his famous warmth or empathy?

Marcin Wichary, at Unsung:

Go to Settings > Accessibility > Zoom, and then turn on “Use scroll gesture with modifier keys to zoom.”

Then, at any moment, you can hold Control and swipe with two fingers (or use a scroll wheel) up or down to zoom the entire screen.

I’d also recommend turning off “Smooth images” under “Advanced…” so you see individual pixels better.

This is one of the very best MacOS tips. No third-party software. Built into MacOS for several (many?) years now. Incredibly useful.

But I had no idea it existed until last June at WWDC. It was Monday, after the morning keynote and just before the afternoon State of the Union. Beautiful sunny day at Apple Park. I ran into my old friend Cabel Sasser, and, maniac that he is, he’d already installed the first Tahoe developer beta on his MacBook Pro. So I sat next to him and we started examining the UI changes in detail. And Cabel was zooming in and out instantaneously. I was like, “Whoa, how are you doing that?” And Cabel was like, “You don’t know about the Accessibility Zoom gesture? Here, let me show you!” And my mind was blown. Cabel emphasized the importance of going into the “Advanced…” dialog to turn off “Smooth images”, and I agree. This is a fantastic feature, but Apple has the default setting wrong for smoothing (a.k.a. blurring) the zoomed image. I honestly can’t imagine why anyone would want the zoomed image blurred.

Anyway, then we both laughed ourselves silly and made ourselves a little queasy examining, in detail, just how bad the Tahoe UI was. And I thought to myself, I need to post this as a tip on Daring Fireball.

Well, it took 10 months, but Wichary posting it on Unsung reminded me that I never posted about it here. [Update: Actually...] Turn this on, start using it, and you’ll find yourself using it every day if you care about design details.

Bonus tip: Subscribe to Wichary’s Unsung in your RSS reader. He’s only been posting there since early December, and it quickly became one of my favorite blogs in the world. One of those blogs where I’m excited every time I see there’s a new post. I would read a post from Wichary describing what it’s like to watch paint dry, because I know he’d only write about it if he noticed something interesting and nuanced. Because he’s only been writing Unsung for a few months, you can catch up on the whole thing.

I’d never before heard of this museum, but now that I’ve seen Wichary’s photos, I want to go. Unsurprisingly, a lot of his shots are details of vintage keyboards. I keep pausing on this one, a “RE-START” key with the word broken across two lines. It’s clearly wrong but somehow feels right.

I’m linking to his album at Flickr, but he posted a long thread of images to Mastodon too.

Bryan Chaffin, two weeks ago:

John Martellaro was good man. He was not only a better man than me, he was one of the best people I knew. It is with a heavy heart that I tell you Mr. Martellaro passed away today.

He rose to the rank of Captain in the U.S. Air Force, and he was a NASA scientist. He worked for years at Apple, and most importantly to me, he was a columnist and the voice of reason and humanity at The Mac Observer. He wrote SciFi and a variety of tech columns for several other Mac sites, too.

Michael Tsai:

He wrote for many Mac publications. Just his author page at TMO has 83 pages of article summaries.

One of Martellaro’s columns I most remember was one I linked to in January 2010, “How Apple Does Controlled Leaks”:

Often Apple has a need to let information out, unofficially. The company has been doing that for years, and it helps preserve Apple’s consistent, official reputation for never talking about unreleased products. I know, because when I was a Senior Marketing Manager at Apple, I was instructed to do some controlled leaks.

The way it works is that a senior exec will come in and say, “We need to release this specific information. John, do you have a trusted friend at a major outlet? If so, call him/her and have a conversation. Idly mention this information and suggest that if it were published, that would be nice. No e-mails!”

Inexplicably, the original piece is no longer hosted at The Mac Observer, but thankfully the Internet Archive has it. What’s interesting about this particular leak, to The Wall Street Journal, is that it came just three weeks before the introduction of the first iPad, and this was the story that pegged the price of the “new multimedia tablet device” at “about $1,000”.

The actual starting price of the iPad was $500, which made the purpose of the leak — if indeed it was a deliberate strategy from Apple leadership — pretty obvious. A $500 price looks pretty good if everyone is expecting a $500 price. But a $500 price is cause for celebration if everyone is expecting it to cost $1,000. It’s a way of under-promising and over-delivering without ever having promised a damn thing.

Another one worth revisiting is this post from December 2011, where I linked to a Martellaro column in which he declared that the success of the Amazon Kindle Fire necessitated that Apple build a 7-inch iPad. “Noted for future claim chowder,” I wrote. Well, Apple debuted the iPad Mini in October 2012.

I never did revisit Martellaro’s accurate prediction. Rest in peace, and enjoy the posthumous Being Right Point.

Tuomas Hämäläinen, on Mastodon:

We’re at Mac OS 26.4 and seems like the accessibility toggles should be way more considered than they are.

Here’s a comparison between “Reduce transparency” off and on. How does it make sense that turning this setting on actually reduces contrast between the background and the UI elements? Buttons and sidebars get this grey cast, which makes them almost blend in with the drop shadows.

Tahoe looks like Huawei’s rushed rip-off of what Tahoe should be.