2025-12-14 06:59:22
Marcus Mendes, 9to5Mac:
Now, on the same day that F1 The Movie debuted at the top of Apple TV’s movie rankings, the company confirmed that Pluribus has reached another, even more impressive milestone: it is the most watched show in the service’s history. Busy day. [...]
Apple doesn’t share viewership numbers, so it is hard to quantify what exactly this means.
However, considering that Apple TV has had quite a few hit shows, including Ted Lasso, Severance, The Morning Show, Slow Horses, and, more recently, The Studio, it is still notable that Pluribus has managed to top them all in just a few short weeks.
I love Pluribus. I’d rank it behind Severance and Slow Horses, but it’s a close call behind Pluribus and The Studio for third place on my Apple TV favorites list. Great shows all four of them. I don’t think there’s any question that when it comes to prestige series, Apple TV had the best 2025. Which other streamer had four shows of that caliber this year?
Jason Kottke is iffy on it, though, because he’s not seeing the appeal of Rhea Seehorn’s protagonist Carol Sturka. Count me with Max Roberts — I find Carol very compelling, and uncomfortably realistic. She feels to me like a real person, not a “character”. It’s one of the best cinematic explorations of loneliness since Tom Hanks in Cast Away.
2025-12-14 04:38:18
From the LucasFonts account, in a comment on Hacker News:
Professional typography can be achieved with both serif and sans-serif fonts. However, Times New Roman — a typeface older than the current president — presents unique challenges. Originally crafted in Great Britain for newspaper printing, Times was optimised for paper, with each letterform meticulously cut and tested for specific sizes. In the digital era, larger size drawings were repurposed as models, resulting in a typeface that appears too thin and sharp when printed at high quality.
Serif fonts are often perceived as more traditional, but they are also more demanding to use effectively. While a skilled typographer can, in theory, produce excellent results with Times, using it in its default digital form is not considered professional practice.
This echoes my thoughts: the State Department should use a traditional-looking serif typeface, but they should choose — or even better, commission — something far better than Times New Roman.
Also from that Hacker News thread, comes this delightful Easter egg: do a Google search for “Lucas de Groot”, and the results will be set in Calibri. Same thing for common fonts like, yes, Times New Roman.
2025-12-14 01:16:28
Peter Kafka, writing at Business Insider:
And last: It’s possible that Middle Eastern countries are investing in an American media conglomerate solely for a financial return, and would have zero interest in the content that conglomerate makes and distributes. But that’s an assertion that many folks would have a hard time taking at face value. And while lots of American companies have sought Middle Eastern funding for years, there was a pause after 2018, following the murder and dismemberment of Washington Post contributor Jamal Khashoggi — a shocking act the CIA concluded was ordered by Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman himself. (He has denied involvement.)
Now bin Salman might end up owning a piece of major American news outlets and other media arms. How’s that going to go over?
David Ellison’s hostile takeover proposal reportedly would have these Middle East partners owning “non-voting” shares, but regardless of their rights in the corporate by-laws, their mere ownership would give them influence. These are profoundly fucked-up countries, where women are a repressed underclass, LGBT activity is punishable by death, and their word is worth nothing when they promise to abide by Western norms.
2025-12-14 00:26:23
This is very funny, but also a good indication of just how far away these things are from actual intelligence. First, a reasonable human being would never get caught in a loop like this. Second, only humans can not only recognize what’s going on here, but also see the humor in it.
2025-12-13 23:09:39
Paris Buttfield-Addison:
A major brick-and-mortar store sold an Apple Gift Card that Apple seemingly took offence to, and locked out my entire Apple ID, effectively bricking my devices and my iCloud Account, Apple Developer ID, and everything associated with it, and I have no recourse. [...]
I am not a casual user. I have literally written the book on Apple development (taking over the Learning Cocoa with Objective-C series, which Apple themselves used to write, for O’Reilly Media, and then 20+ books following that). I help run the longest-running Apple developer event not run by Apple themselves, /dev/world. I have effectively been an evangelist for this company’s technology for my entire professional life. We had an app on the App Store on Day 1 in every sense of the world.
I am asking for a human at Apple to review this case. I suspect an automated fraud flag regarding the bad gift card triggered a nuclear response that frontline support cannot override. I have escalated this through my many friends in WWDR and SRE at Apple, with no success.
I am desperate to resolve this and restore my digital life.
The triggering event, as best he can determine, was his failed attempt to redeem a $500 Apple gift card purchased from a major retail chain. There’s a very active thread on Hacker News about his plight, where Buttfield-Addison himself is commenting. That thread pointed to this description of one form of gift card thievery, in which thieves tamper with the cards in-store to steal the codes, tamper with the code, and then some unsuspecting victim buys the tampered card and the thieves get the credit.
2025-12-13 12:00:00
Weekly sponsorships have been the top source of revenue for Daring Fireball ever since I started selling them back in 2007. They’ve succeeded, I think, because they make everyone happy. They generate good money. There’s only one sponsor per week and the sponsors are always relevant to at least some sizable portion of the DF audience, so you, the reader, are never annoyed and hopefully often intrigued by them. And, from the sponsors’ perspective, they work. My favorite thing about them is how many sponsors return for subsequent weeks after seeing the results.
After a solid run in the second half of 2025 with sponsorships sold out weeks, if not months, in advance, we’ve arrived at the end of the year with the last three weeks still open — starting this coming Monday. I’m offering those weeks at a discount.
Traffic at DF tends not to ebb over holidays, and while I slow down, I don’t stop posting. If you still check DF when you’re bored over the holidays, think about how many other people do too.
I’m also booking sponsorships for Q1 2026, and six of those weeks are already sold.
If you’ve got a product or service you think would be of interest to DF’s audience of people obsessed with high quality and good design, get in touch.
