Juli Clover (no release notes, security, developer): According to Apple’s release notes, watchOS 11.2 lets you pause video that you’re recording on the iPhone using the Camera Remote app on Apple Watch. Previously: watchOS 11.1

Juli Clover (release notes, developer, security, enterprise): visionOS 2.2 adds new wide and ultrawide aspect ratios to the Mac Virtual Display feature, so you can have more workspace when using the Vision Pro as a display for your Mac. Apple says that the ultrawide setting is the equivalent of two 5K monitors side by side. […]

Apple: Siri on HomePod is now integrated with Apple Music natural language search so you can describe what you want to hear using any combination of categories like genre, mood, decade or activity. Enhance Dialogue on HomePod (2nd generation) when paired with Apple TV 4K gives you the option to hear speech more clearly over […]

Katie Robinson, reporting for The New York Times:

After President-elect Donald J. Trump announced a cascade of cabinet picks last month, the editorial board of The Los Angeles Times decided it would weigh in. One writer prepared an editorial arguing that the Senate should follow its traditional process for confirming nominees, particularly given the board’s concerns about some of his picks, and ignore Mr. Trump’s call for so-called recess appointments.

The paper’s owner, the billionaire medical entrepreneur Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, had other ideas.

Hours before the editorial was set to be sent to the printer for the next day’s newspaper, Dr. Soon-Shiong told the opinion department’s leaders that the editorial could not be published unless the paper also published an editorial with an opposing view.

Baffled by his order and with the print deadline approaching, editors removed the editorial, headlined “Donald Trump’s cabinet choices are not normal. The Senate’s confirmation process should be.” It never ran.

I’m not going to keep pointing to the ways Soon-Shiong is debasing the once-great LA Times. Until and if he sells it, which I don’t expect him to do, it’s over. What the LA Times was is gone. That sounds like hyperbole but it’s the obvious truth. One jackass columnist or even a fabulist reporter won’t sink an entire newspaper’s credibility. The Judith Miller reporting on “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq was a disaster for the New York Times 20 years ago, but while that saga did lasting damage to the NYT’s credibility, it didn’t sink the ship. But an owner like Soon-Shiong can sink the ship. The LA Times isn’t really a newspaper anymore — it’s a vanity rag.

I’m just fantasizing here, but someone with money should consider sweeping into Los Angeles and setting up a rival publication, and poaching all the talent from the Times. I’d have suggested Jeff Bezos until recently, but, well, not anymore. Off the top of my head: Marc Benioff (who now owns Time magazine) or Laurene Powell Jobs (whose Emerson Collective is the majority owner of The Atlantic), perhaps?

The newspaper business, alas, isn’t what it used to be. When it was thriving, local competition would have already been in place. Even small cities had at least two rival papers. Now, New York might be the only city in America left with any true competition between newspapers.

Ev Williams, writing the backstory of, and raison d’être for, Mozi:

And here we are, 20+ years later, with address books full of partial, duplicate, and outdated information. Perhaps the reason for this is that social networks (or the social network) solved this problem — for a while. When Facebook was ubiquitous it was probably a pretty good reflection of many people’s real-life relationships. It told you where they lived, who you knew in common, and all kinds of other details.

Another idea that seemed obvious was that, given how deeply social humans are, social products would dominate the internet. Ten to fifteen years ago, this seemed inevitable.

But something else happened instead.

Social networks became “social media,” which, at first, meant receiving content from people you chose to hear from. But in the quest to maximize engagement, the timeline of friends and people you picked to follow turned into a free-for-all battle for attention. And it turns out, for most people, your friends aren’t as entertaining as (god forbid) influencers who spend their waking hours making “content.”

In other words, social media became … media.

To tell you the truth, I think there are positive aspects of this evolution (perhaps I’ll get into that in another post). But we clearly lost something.

This whole piece is so good, so clear. This distinction between social networking and social media is obvious in hindsight, but only in hindsight. Williams posted it on Medium (natch), but Mozi’s website links directly to it for their “About” page. I’m excited about this. I think they’re on to something here. It’s even a great name.