Steve Wozniak turned 75 (!) and was profiled by John Blackstone for CBS News (also posted to YouTube). Slashdot linked to it, and in the comments, someone gently jabbed at Woz for having sold, rather than hoarded, his stock in Apple. Woz himself chimed in, with this comment for the ages:

I gave all my Apple wealth away because wealth and power are not what I live for. I have a lot of fun and happiness. I funded a lot of important museums and arts groups in San Jose, the city of my birth, and they named a street after me for being good. I now speak publicly and have risen to the top. I have no idea how much I have but after speaking for 20 years it might be $10M plus a couple of homes. I never look for any type of tax dodge. I earn money from my labor and pay something like 55% combined tax on it. I am the happiest person ever. Life to me was never about accomplishment, but about Happiness, which is Smiles minus Frowns. I developed these philosophies when I was 18-20 years old and I never sold out.

Apple never would have existed without Woz, and Woz personified “insanely great” engineering. He never contributed anything technical to Apple after the Apple II in the early 1980s, but, man, so much of his spirit and personality is infused in Apple’s DNA. He’s a hero to so many people who went on to work at Apple, and to so many of us on the outside too.

His little comment above describing his philosophy on life reminds me of one of my favorite Woz stories, from Michael Moritz’s long-out-of-print 1984 book The Little Kingdom: The Private Story of Apple Computer, pp. 281–282:

Wozniak, who seemed determined to follow Samuel Johnson’s advice that it was better to live rich than to die rich, was always louder, splashier, and more cavalier about his fortune. As a student and an engineer he had always managed his financial affairs haphazardly and nothing changed as he grew wealthy. He could never keep track of receipts, for months didn’t bother to seek financial advice, and made a habit of filing his tax returns late. Wozniak turned into an approachable teddy bear and a soft touch. When friends, acquaintances, or strangers asked him for a loan he often wrote out a check on the spot.

Unlike Jobs, who guarded his founder’s stock carefully, Wozniak distributed some of his. He gave stock worth $4 million to his parents, sister, and brother and $2 million to friends. He made some investments in start-up companies. He bought a Porsche and fastened the license plates APPLE II to the car. His father found $250,000 worth of uncashed checks strewn about the car and said of his son, “A person like him shouldn’t have that much money.” After Wozniak finally did arrange for some financial advice, he arrived at Apple one day to announce, “My lawyer said to diversify so I just bought a movie theater.” Even that turned into a complicated venture. The theater, located among the barrios on the east side of San Jose, provoked angry community protests after it screened a gang movie, The Warriors. Wozniak attended a few community meetings, listened to the concerns of the local leaders, promised that his theater wouldn’t show violent or pornographic movies, and accompanied by Wigginton, spent a few afternoons in the empty, darkened theater screening movies and playing censor.

Jason Lalljee, reporting for Axios Tuesday:

President Trump’s nomination of Heritage Foundation economist E.J. Antoni to head the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Monday drew criticism from economists across the political spectrum. Why it matters: The growing negative consensus among conservative economists is unusual given Antoni’s own conservative pedigree.

Here we go with “unusual” as a euphemism for “unprecedented” — or perhaps, most accurately, “crazy” — again. The dichotomy here is that Trump and MAGA have flipped what “conservative” means in US politics. Some legitimate economists are left-leaning, some are right-leaning. It’s a field of study, like the law, that attracts from across the political spectrum. But all legitimate economists believe in trying to objectively measure the economy. MAGA kooks have overrun Republican elected politics, but not so with economics. So of course legitimate conservative economists are objecting to Trump’s nomination of this guy Antoni, who both is a crackpot kook of the paranoid style and looks like one, with crazy eyes and, of all things, a devil beard.

To the commentary:

Antoni’s “work at Heritage has frequently included elementary errors or nonsensical choices that all bias his findings in the same partisan direction,” Stan Veuger, a senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, told Axios’ Courtenay Brown and Emily Peck.

Dave Hebert, an economist at the conservative American Institute for Economic Research, wrote in a post on X that he’s worked with Antoni before and implored the Senate to block the nomination. “I’ve been on several programs with him at this point and have been impressed by two things: his inability to understand basic economics and the speed with which he’s gone MAGA,” Hebert said. [...]

Jessica Riedl, a senior Manhattan Institute fellow, shared another example from X, in which Antoni appeared not to know that the BLS’ measure of import prices did not account for the impact of tariffs. “The articles and tweets I’ve seen him publish are probably the most error-filled of any think tank economist right now,” she wrote. “I hope we see better at BLS.”

That’s the take on Antoni from conservative economists.

Emma Roth, reporting for The Verge back on July 1 (emphasis added):

Threads’ DMs are currently available to users aged 18 and over on Android, iOS, and the web, but you can only have one-on-one conversations right now. Moving forward, Threads plans to roll out the ability to choose who can send you messages, including people who don’t follow you on Threads and Instagram. You’ll also be able to review a folder dedicated to message requests, similar to what’s offered on X. Threads is working on a group messaging feature and inbox filters, too.

Though the platform says its DMs are “protected by our robust privacy standards, account protections and safety infrastructure,” Threads spokesperson Alec Booker confirmed to The Verge that “Threads will not support end-to-end encryption for messaging.” Booker adds that Meta will “continue evolving DMs on Threads based on feedback from the community.”

The lack of E2EE for a new messaging platform in 2025 is unconscionable. Either don’t offer DMs at all or only offer them using E2EE. That would be for Meta’s benefit, not just its users. They shouldn’t even want the ability to look at private messages.

That said, I found myself chatting with an old friend on Threads last night, using the app on my phone. Somehow we’d never exchanged iMessage credentials. We more or less just used the Threads DM chat to exchange current phone numbers to move the chat to iMessage. Today, at my desk, I wanted to double-check that there was nothing in the Threads chat I’d want to save — and, I couldn’t figure out how to see DMs in Threads’s web app. I found a few articles, like the one above at The Verge, that said it was available on the web, but ... it isn’t. At least not for me, or most people. One never knows how many people are getting an A/B test or early rollout with Meta.

For all the power she wields with the White House's affairs, Laura Loomer does not have the traditional tools that her rivals in the MAGA influencer industrial complex have - the highest follower count, the most political power, the most internet platforms, etc. But the fact remains that she's the influencer responsible for getting Donald […]

Kate Clark / Bloomberg:
Sources: current and former OpenAI employees plan to sell ~$6B in stock to Thrive Capital, SoftBank, and others in a secondary sale that values OpenAI at ~$500B  —  SoftBank, Dragoneer and Thrive Capital are set to buy OpenAI shares from current and former employees at a $500 billion valuation.