2026-01-12 10:52:53
Shit’s getting real, folks.
2026-01-12 05:25:00
My thanks to Copilot Money for sponsoring last week at DF. Copilot is a personal finance app for the iPhone, iPad, and Mac, and they’ve always deeply believed in the value of embracing the design idioms and technical features of truly native apps for Apple platforms. Apple has noticed, awarding Copilot an App Store Editor’s Choice and featuring Copilot earlier this year on Apple Developer for their use of Swift Charts.
Copilot’s big news this month is they’ve launched a new web app, bringing access to Copilot from any device, anywhere. It’s designed with all the attention to detail — and concern for privacy and security — as their native apps.
Copilot Money brings all your spending, budgets, investments, and net worth into one organized dashboard, with intelligent categorization and insights that help you stay on track without spreadsheets or app-hopping. Designed to feel calm and intuitive, Copilot makes it easy to understand your finances across all your devices.
Copilot first sponsored DF back in 2021. My wife and I started using it then to track our finances, and we haven’t looked back. Copilot Money isn’t just better than anything we’d used before, it absolutely blew everything else away. It’s easy to connect to your financial accounts, and once you do, you don’t need to spend any effort at all to enter transactions. Copilot just tracks it all automatically, and most importantly, presents it to you in clear, intuitive ways. It’s so good. I’m not saying that because they sponsored DF last week — I’m saying that as a happy paying customer for over four years now.
Copilot is offering DF readers two months free with code DARING, plus 26% off your first year for a limited time, available through this link.
2026-01-12 05:24:47
U.S. Senators Ron Wyden (D, Oregon), Ed Markey (D, Massachussetts), and Ben Ray Luján (D, New Mexico), in a letter addressed to Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai:
Your app stores’ policies are clear. Google’s terms of service require apps to “prohibit users from creating, uploading, or distributing content that facilitates the exploitation or abuse of children” including prohibiting the “portrayal of children in a manner that could result in the sexual exploitation of children.” Apps that do not are said to be subject to “immediate removal from Google Play” for violations. Similarly, Apple’s terms of service bar apps from including “offensive” or “just plain creepy” content, which under any definition must include nonconsensually-generated sexualized images of children and women. Further, Apple’s terms explicitly bar apps from including content that is “[o]vertly sexual or pornographic material” including material “intended to stimulate erotic rather than aesthetic or emotional feelings.”
Turning a blind eye to X’s egregious behavior would make a mockery of your moderation practices. Indeed, not taking action would undermine your claims in public and in court that your app stores offer a safer user experience than letting users download apps directly to their phones. This principle has been core to your advocacy against legislative reforms to increase app store competition and your defenses to claims that your app stores abuse their market power through their payment systems.
Emphasizing that leaving X and Grok available in the App Store and Play Store is directly contradictory to Apple and Google’s stated reasons for maintaining control over software distribution is a good pressure point. Do they selectively enforce content moderation based on whims and/or shifting political winds, or rigorously enforce the plain language of their own content guidelines? Which is it? It can’t be both.
2026-01-11 05:04:26
Elizabeth Lopatto, writing at The Verge, “Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai Are Cowards”:
Since X’s users started using Grok to undress women and children using deepfake images, I have been waiting for what I assumed would be inevitable: X getting booted from Apple’s and Google’s app stores. The fact that it hasn’t happened yet tells me something serious about Silicon Valley’s leadership: Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai are spineless cowards who are terrified of Elon Musk.
Lopatto’s outrage and righteous anger are justified, but I think mostly misdirected. Apple and Google — and thus, Cook and Pichai, as the men who sit behind the desks where the buck stops at both companies — are culpable. But this is ultimately not about them, and not about Musk. It’s Trump, as president, they fear. Not Musk. And they are correct to fear Trump.
Year one of Trump 2.0 has crystallized what had become — after decades of deliberate restraint after World War II, and even more so after the end of the Cold War — overlooked. The Presidency of the United States bestows upon its officeholder enormous, unparalleled, power. No one was afraid of Trump after he lost to Joe Biden in 2020. The man was convicted of 34 felonies in a cold New York City courtroom in May 2024, a mere 19 months ago. Trump expected and asked for riots outside the courtroom. He got nothing but pathetic support from a handful of kooks. A year earlier, he lost a humiliating sexual assault civil lawsuit to E. Jean Carroll. Trump, just a year and a half ago, was a buffoon getting his mug shot taken. Today he’s arguing that his power is unchecked by anything other than his own sense of morality.
No other president has ever abused (or, if you support him, wielded) the powers of the office like Trump has. The power and influence of Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai, CEOs of two of the top five companies in the world, isn’t merely superseded by Trump’s power and influence as president. Their power and influence are dwarfed by Trump’s. Any credible argument about how they should act must acknowledge that profound imbalance.
Lopatto, in her closing:
I never want to hear any moral grandstanding from these boys ever again. The next time Tim Cook says “privacy is a human right,” the only possible response is to laugh in his face. I mean, Apple and Google are fine distributing an app that has created an undressed image Grok made of Renee Nicole Good, the mother who was shot by ICE in Minneapolis. How do you plan to defend getting rid of the ICEBlock app while allowing X to generate degrading images of a woman ICE killed? Can Apple and Google even identify their values beyond their commitment to “shareholder value”? What’s your fucking endgame here, guys?
The profound power imbalance here is frustrating. But also terrifying. It’s folly to think these CEOs should steer their companies into direct confrontation with Trump. It would do no ultimate good for Apple or Google to burn themselves to the ground in protest. These men aren’t beholden to shareholders, per se. They’re doing their duty to institutions they’ve devoted their lives to. Companies that are worth preserving and protecting. Perhaps not in your estimation, but certainly from theirs.
But abject obsequiousness — which more and more seems the path Cook and Pichai are choosing — is no more justifiable a response than corporate suicide. The situation is not binary: acquiescence or war. There is a broad middle ground, founded on principle.
Disney’s response to the Jimmy Kimmel controversy a few months ago shows the way. Defend the company’s principles while simultaneously defending the company from Trump’s demented wrath. You can take the position of “Fuck you, make me” without ever saying those words. Objection is not confrontation. Do the right thing and enforce the App Store and Play Store guidelines, and remove X and Grok from the stores. Make Musk object. Make the Trump administration object. Make them defend the indefensible — in public. Make clear why the apps were removed from the app stores and force Musk — and Trump, if he chooses — to argue that those things are A-OK by them. In court.
The judicious path for Apple and Google (and every other U.S. company) may well be to obey the law, even when the law is being actively corrupted. But the correct path is not to obey in advance. Stand behind the law while the law still exists on your side. Disney resisted Trump’s preposterous demand that they fire Jimmy Kimmel without lasting controversy, simply by standing firm in their conviction. Apple and Google could certainly do the same regarding apps that are being used to generate CSAM and deepfake harassment, regardless if the apps are part of the private fiefdom of Trump’s ally Elon Musk. It’s wise for Cook and Pichai to pick their battles. This one, I think, is worth picking. This is a moment when the App Store and Play Store can stand firmly on the side of longstanding and correct societal norms.
2026-01-11 03:31:07
Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic (gift link), on the fifth anniversary of the January 6 insurrection and the first year of the second Trump presidency:
We have been watching indecency triumph in the public sphere on and off for more than 10 years now, since the moment Trump insulted John McCain’s war record. For reasons that are quite possibly too unbearable to contemplate, a large group of American voters was not repulsed by such slander — they were actually aroused by it — and our politics have not been the same. Much has been said, including by me, about Trump’s narcissism, his autocratic inclinations, his disconnection from reality, but not nearly enough has been said about his fundamental indecency, the characteristic that undergirds everything he says and does.
2026-01-09 22:47:26
Ben Cohen, writing last week for The Wall Street Journal (gift link):
One rainy day 40 years ago, Moylan was headed to a meeting across Ford’s campus and hopped in a company car. When he saw the fuel tank was nearly empty, he stopped at a gas pump. What happened next is something that’s happened to all of us: He realized that he’d parked on the wrong side.
Unlike the rest of us, he wasn’t infuriated. He was inspired. By the time he pulled his car around, he was already thinking about how to solve this everyday inconvenience that drives people absolutely crazy. And because the gas pump wasn’t covered by an overhead awning, he was also soaking wet. But when he got back to the office, Moylan didn’t even bother taking off his drenched coat when he started typing the first draft of a memo.
“I would like to propose a small addition,” he wrote, “in all passenger car and truck lines.” The proposal he had in mind was a symbol on the dashboard that would tell drivers which side of the car the gas tank was on. [...]
As soon as they read his memo, they began prototyping his little indicator that would be known as the Moylan Arrow. Within months, it was on the dashboard of Ford’s upcoming models. Within years, it was ripped off by the competition. Before long, it was a fixture of just about every car in the world.
What a fantastic story. I’m old enough that I remember learning to drive on cars that didn’t have the Moylan Arrow. Then I remember spotting one sometime in the 1990s, and wondering if I’d just never noticed them before. But no: this seemingly incredibly obvious design element had only recently been invented. The Journal has a copy of Moylan’s original memo, and it’s a delight to read. Clear, concise, persuasive.
“Society loves the founder who builds new companies, like Henry Ford,” Ford CEO Jim Farley told me. “I would argue that Jim Moylan is an equally compelling kind of disrupter: an engineer in a large company who insisted on making our daily lives better.”
These days, there are two types of drivers: the ones aware of the Moylan Arrow and the ones who get to find out.
Rest in peace, Jim Moylan.
