John’s Blog

Congratulations to Rory on such an amazing win. A long time coming and well deserved. I don’t watch much golf, but The Masters is always on in our household each year. It’s so fun when the weather is perfect and the competition is on point, just like it was all of this weekend.

McIlroy joins elite company with his win this weekend: only 6 players ever have won the ”career grand slam” of professional golf. Gene Sarazen, Ben Hogan, Gary Player, Jack Nicklaus, Tiger Woods, and now Rory McIlroy.

Anne Applebaum, for The Atlantic:

This is what arbitrary, absolute power looks like. And this is why the men who wrote the Constitution never wanted anyone to have it. In that famously hot, stuffy room in Philadelphia, windows closed for the sake of secrecy, they sweated and argued about how to limit the powers of the American executive. They arrived at the idea of dividing power between different branches of government. As James Madison wrote in “Federalist No. 47”: “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary in the same hands … may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”

More than two centuries later, the system created by that first Constitutional Congress has comprehensively failed. The people and institutions that are supposed to check executive power are refusing to restrain this president. We now have a de facto tyrant who thinks he can bend reality to his will without taking any facts or any evidence into consideration, and without listening to any contrary views. And although the economic damage he has caused is easier to measure, he has inflicted the same level of harm to scientific research, to civil liberties, to health care, and to the civil service.

The representatives from those first Constitutional Congress sessions must be rolling in their graves right now.

Jason Koebler, for 404 Media:

The idea of a Made-in-the-USA iPhone has been an obsession for politicians for years, a kind of shorthand goalpost that would signal “American manufacturing is back” that is nonetheless nowhere close to being a reality and would require a nearly impossible-to-fathom restructuring of the global supply chains that make the iPhone possible in the first place. Over the years, economists and manufacturing experts have attempted to calculate how much an American-made iPhone would cost. […]

The truth is that, assembled in the U.S. or not, the iPhone is a truly international device that is full of components manufactured all over the world and materials mined from dozens of different countries. Apple has what is among the most complex supply chains that has ever been designed in human history, and it is not going to be able to completely change that supply chain anytime soon.

Greg Wyshynski, for ESPN:

Washington Capitals star Alex Ovechkin scored goal No. 895 on Sunday, passing Hall of Famer Wayne Gretzky to become the NHL’s all-time goal-scoring leader.

Ovechkin, on a pass from longtime teammate Tom Wilson, netted the record breaker in a 4–1 loss to the New York Islanders with a power-play goal past fellow Russian Ilya Sorokin with 12:34 left in the second period of Sunday’s game – the 1,487th game of his career, the same as Gretzky’s career total.

And Ovechkin:

This is something crazy […] I’m probably going to need a couple more days. Maybe a couple weeks to realize what it means to be No. 1. […]

All I can say: I’m very proud. I’m very proud for myself. I’m really proud for my family, for all my teammates, that helped me to reach that milestone, and for all my coaches. It’s huge. It’s an unbelievable moment.

Super cool moment. Congrats, mate.

Tobi Lütke, with an interesting company memo to the Shopify, also posted on X:

Using AI effectively is now a fundamental expectation of everyone at Shopify. It’s a tool of all trades today, and will only grow in importance. Frankly, I don’t think it’s feasible to opt out of learning the skill of applying AI in your craft; you are welcome to try, but I want to be honest I cannot see this working out today, and definitely not tomorrow. Stagnation is almost certain, and stagnation is slow-motion failure. If you’re not climbing, you’re sliding.

Some hot takes in here that I mostly agree with. What I don’t care for, though, is dictating to everyone how to do their jobs. AI is awesome (and I’m in the camp that uses it constantly) but let people find that for themselves, not by mandate.

I quite enjoyed this profile of Jay Graber, CEO of Bluesky, by Kyle Chayka in The New Yorker. Graber seems measured and thoughtful, and I’m glad we have at least one sensible individual trying to grow a social network.

The long-awaited successor to the Switch is official and it is launching on June 5th. Most existing Switch games are compatible and playable on the Switch 2. Very nice. And a new Mario Kart!

Jeff Passan, for ESPN:

An MIT-educated physics professor at the University of Michigan for seven years, [Aaron] Leanhardt left academia for athletics specifically to solve these sorts of problems. And as he spoke with more players, the framework of a solution began to reveal itself. With strikeouts at an all-time high, hitters wanted to counter that by making more contact. And the easiest way to do so, Leanhardt surmised, was to increase the size of the barrel on their bat.

Elongating the barrel – the fat part of the bat that generates the hardest and most contact – sounded great in theory. Doing so in practice, though, would increase the weight of the bat and slow down swing speed, negating the gains a larger sweet spot would provide. […]

The creation of the bowling pin bat (also known as the torpedo bat) optimizes the most important tool in baseball by redistributing weight from the end of the bat toward the area 6 to 7 inches below its tip, where major league players typically strike the ball. Doing so takes an apparatus that for generations has looked the same and gives it a fun-house-mirror makeover, with the fat part of the bat more toward the handle and the end tapering toward a smaller diameter, like a bowling pin.

There was much controversy about these bats over the weekend, certainly because this story involves the Yankees. But, these bats are entirely within the letter and the spirit of MLB’s bat regulations. I love seeing clever innovations in such an old game.

Alex Andrejev, for The Athletic:

Many baseball fans took to social media Thursday to report issues streaming Opening Day games on MLB.TV. Fans shared various accounts on X of encountering error messages while trying to watch games, with the issue lasting at least an hour during the early slate.

In my experience it lasted way longer than an hour. This was so disappointing! I couldn’t even finish watching the Orioles 12–2 win over the Blue Jays today it was so glitchy.

Not a good sign as more teams choose to have MLB.tv produce and stream games this year.

Interesting new feature from Cloudflare:

[We’ve] also seen an explosion of new crawlers used by AI companies to scrape data for model training. AI Crawlers generate more than 50 billion requests to the Cloudflare network every day, or just under 1% of all web requests we see. […]

[W]e have found that blocking malicious bots can alert the attacker that you are on to them, leading to a shift in approach, and a never-ending arms race. So, we wanted to create a new way to thwart these unwanted bots, without letting them know they’ve been thwarted.

To do this, we decided to use a new offensive tool in the bot creator’s toolset that we haven’t really seen used defensively: AI-generated content. When we detect unauthorized crawling, rather than blocking the request, we will link to a series of AI-generated pages that are convincing enough to entice a crawler to traverse them. But while real looking, this content is not actually the content of the site we are protecting, so the crawler wastes time and resources.

I’m not sure if this is a good thing or not, but seems like a very clever idea to combat the problem.

Steven Levy writing for Wired:

One of [Yahoo CEO] Lanzone’s canniest AI moves was acquiring Artifact, the AI-powered news aggregator created by Instagram cofounders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger. When the pair decided it would not become a viable business, they announced its closure and Lanzone was among multiple suitors vying for the underlying technology. It became the centerpiece of the homepage that Yahoo relaunched earlier this year. “Instead of incorporating their technology into our product, we did it the other way,” Lanzone says. “Essentially Yahoo News is now Artifact.” Systrom approves. “We partnered with Yahoo because they made a strong offer, but also because they planned on deploying our hard work to many millions of people,” he says.

Interesting update from Yahoo on its acquisition of Artifact last year.

Great story by Jonathan Margolis in this weekend’s issue of Air Mail:

Later, Leica helped Jewish employees and their families—along with other Wetzlar Jews who didn’t work for Leica—escape the Holocaust by sending them to New York as “employees.” In many cases, the jobs they were ostensibly leaving for didn’t exist. To this day, there are dozens of descendants of the “Leica Freedom Train” living in the U.S.

The story goes that the local Gestapo wanted to round up the Leitz family as traitors but were overruled by Göring, head of the Luftwaffe, who said Leitz’s contribution to the war effort was too important to close the company down. Another story that’s never been confirmed is that Leitz deliberately made optical products such as aircraft bombsights “a little bit off,” so German bombers would miss their targets.

Ernst Leitz II never spoke publicly about the Nazi period and said almost nothing about it, even to his children. “From Ernst Leitz’s point of view,” one friend of the family has said, “he was only doing what any decent person would have done in his position. The Leitz credo was ‘Do good, but do not speak about it.’”

The Pebble smart watch is back. I missed this announcement from founder Eric Migicovsky earlier in the year, but was stoked to see the announcement of new hardware this week.

This time around, Migicovsky is funding the project himself and learning from the mistakes of Pebbles past. His reasoning for creating new Pebble watches is simple and admirable:

Why are we making new Pebble-like smartwatches?

Pretty simple - because we want one! No company has made a perfect smartwatch for people like us, so we’re going to make the exact smartwatch we want. Read the full story on my blog, but it comes down to 5 key features:Always on e-paper screenLong battery lifeSimple and beautiful designPhysical buttonsHackable

No smartwatch on the market since Pebble offers this combination of features…until today!

The code is all available on Github.

And that white Core 2 Duo looks really nice. 🤔

Drew Lerner for Awful Announcing:

Tuesday’s MLB opener between the Los Angeles Dodgers and Chicago Cubs in Tokyo, which featured several high-profile Japanese baseball stars including Shohei Ohtani, drew an audience of 25 million viewers in Japan, according to MLB PR. For reference, the total population of Japan is around 125 million, meaning one in five Japanese citizens watched the Dodgers’ win on Tuesday. […]

To put the game’s Japanese audience in perspective, 25 million viewers is larger than any American baseball audience since Game 7 of the 2017 World Series between the Dodgers and Houston Astros which drew 28.2 million viewers stateside.

Incredible numbers, and one man to thank: Shohei Ohtani. He’s the best player in the league by a mile, and probably the best athlete in the world.

Good take by Federico Viticci at MacStories:

In working with my iPad Pro over the past few months, I’ve realized something that might have seemed absurd just a few years ago: some of the best apps I’m using – the ones with truly desktop-class layouts and experiences – aren’t native iPad apps.

They’re web apps.

Great desktop web apps are also great on the iPad, especially when using a connected keyboard.

One example: I’ve been running GitHub Codespaces in a browser on my iPad a ton this year. It’s really great for reviewing Pull Requests, running a console, and making some light code changes. Plus I can add it to my home screen to remove any Safari browser chrome from around the window. It’s really quite amazing that this is even possible.