2025-11-22 01:28:41
OpenAI:
Early feedback from the pilot has been positive, so we’re expanding group chats to all logged-in users on ChatGPT Free, Go, Plus and Pro plans globally over the coming days. We will continue refining the experience as more people start using it.
That didn’t take long — the initial rollout limited to Japan, New Zealand, Korea, and Taiwan started just three days ago.
2025-11-22 01:20:28
“Carol Sturka”, actress Rhea Seehorn’s fictional protagonist of the new Apple TV series Pluribus, is on Reddit is right now — at 12n ET / 9am PT — doing an AMA in character. Sturka is a fantasy novelist, and Apple Books has an 11-page excerpt of her “new” novel Bloodsong of Wycaro. Unclear whether it’s Seehorn writing the in-character responses, but it’s definitely Seehorn in the confirmation photo. Reminiscent of some of the promotional fun Apple has had for Severance.
Both my wife and I are loving Pluribus so far. I highly recommend watching the first episode without even knowing the premise, if you can.
2025-11-21 08:21:40
The Steve Jobs Archive:
To mark Toy Story’s 30th anniversary, we’re sharing a never-before-seen interview with Steve from November 22, 1996 — exactly one year after the film debuted in theaters.
Toy Story was the world’s first entirely computer-animated feature-length film. An instant hit with audiences and critics, it also transformed Pixar, which went public the week after its premiere. Buoyed by Toy Story ’s success, Pixar’s stock price closed at nearly double its initial offering, giving it a market valuation of approximately $1.5 billion and marking the largest IPO of 1995. The following year, Toy Story was nominated for three Academy Awards en route to winning a Special Achievement Oscar in March. In July, Pixar announced that it would close its television-commercial unit to focus primarily on feature films. By the time of the interview, the team had grown by 70 percent in less than a year; A Bug’s Life was in production; and behind the scenes, Steve was using his new leverage to renegotiate Pixar’s partnership with Disney.
Kind of a weird interview. The video quality is poor, and whoever was running the camera zoomed in and out awkwardly. It’s like ... just a VHS tape? But it’s also weird in a cool way to get a “new” Steve Jobs interview in 2025, and Jobs, as ever, is thoughtful and insightful. Well worth 23 minutes of your time.
There’s a particularly interesting bit at the end when Jobs discusses how Pixar was half a computer company (with extraordinary technology) and half a movie studio (with extraordinary filmmaking talent), but eventually they had to choose between the two industries for how to pay their employees to motivate them to remain at Pixar. The Hollywood way would be with contracts; the Silicon Valley way would be with stock options. Jobs chose the Silicon Valley path for Pixar.
2025-11-20 05:45:23
Anthony Castrovince, reporting for MLB.com on the new broadcast rights agreement that will cover the next three seasons of baseball:
Sunday Night Baseball will shift from ESPN, where it aired since 1990, to NBCUniversal, which also secured the rights to Sunday Leadoff and the Wild Card Series in the postseason for NBC and Peacock.
Netflix will now air the T-Mobile Home Run Derby, an Opening Night exclusive and special event games set to include the 2026 MLB at Field of Dreams Game and the World Baseball Classic in Japan.
And ESPN will receive a national midweek game package throughout the season while also acquiring the rights to sell MLB.TV, the league’s out-of-market streaming service that set a record with 19.4 billion minutes watched in 2025. [...]
FOX/FS1 will continue to be the home of the All-Star Game and regular season games, as well as the World Series, League Championship Series, and Division Series presented by Booking.com. TBS will continue to house LCS and Division Series telecasts, plus regular season games on Tuesday nights. Apple TV will continue to stream “Friday Night Baseball” doubleheaders throughout the regular season.
Back in August, Kendall Baker of Yahoo Sports reported:
- Apple is fully out. RIP Friday Night Baseball
- NBC/Peacock is in, for Friday and Sunday exclusive and Wild Card
- MLB TV being sold to ESPN (for a boatload of $$$)
- Netflix gets HR Derby
He batted .750 on that tweet.
2025-11-20 04:29:24
Miguel Arroz, on Mastodon:
Unpopular opinion, apparently: companies like Cloudflare and Amazon provide very high quality services people and enterprises actually need, with a level of uptime and security vastly superior to what most of their customers would achieve on their own or using traditional providers. Their downtimes being so visible is a consequence of their success.
A few readers have (very politely!) asked me whether yesterday’s outage (which made DF unreachable for, I think, about 90 minutes) made me rethink relying on a centralized provider like Cloudflare. My answer is no.
Until I started using Cloudflare in 2018, Daring Fireball relied on no upstream service. I paid for a server from a web hosting provider (those providers changed a few times over the years), and when you, a reader, requested a page on this site, your browser communicated directly with my server via HTTP requests and my server responded directly back. The basic architecture of the World Wide Web is beautifully simple, and I embraced that simplicity with the way I hosted and served Daring Fireball.
But the move away from HTTP to HTTPS added a lot of complexity. That complexity is probably worth it, overall, but it came at the price of simplicity. I originally made the switch to using Cloudflare as a caching front-end for Daring Fireball as a solution to an SSL-related slowdown that affected only some visitors in 2018. But I’d started using Cloudflare to handle my DNS the year before.
Daring Fireball has always been a fast website and has always had very good uptime. That’s not because the back end is cleverly architected, but rather because it’s so simply architected. But DF’s overall uptime and the frequency of any sort of performance problems went from good to great when I started relying on Cloudflare as a proxy. Also, in recent years, bot traffic has exploded. (Thanks, AI.) I’m pretty sure my server could handle those bursts of traffic on its own, but I sleep better not having to worry about it, because Cloudflare handles mind-boggling amounts of traffic.
2025-11-20 03:48:21
Apple Newsroom:
Finalists in the Mac App of the Year category provided users with powerful tools to confidently take on new projects:
- Acorn, for being the go-to tool for pro-level photo edits.
- Essayist, for taking the stress out of sourcing and formatting academic papers.
- Under My Roof, for keeping homeowners organized and prepared.
Nice to see Flying Meat’s Acorn — one of my own favorite and most-used apps since 2007, before it even shipped — getting this sort of recognition from Apple. Back in June, Apple featured Acorn in the WWDC keynote, during the preview of Liquid Glass.
