Alberto Romero:

AI is like religion. Either you believe it changes everything, or you don’t believe at all. There is no moderate position; nobody believes in AGI “more or less,” just like nobody is “casually religious.” If God exists, the only coherent response is to reorganize your entire life around that fact, as priests do. If you pray sometimes, then you are just an atheist who’s also fearful. When tech companies spend hundreds of billions on capital expenditures to add sparkly AI features to Office, Gmail, and Instagram, I only see fearful atheists — guys who don’t believe in AI but pretend just in case.

In 2026, the four largest cloud and AI infrastructure providers — Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft — committed to spending $670 billion on CapEx. Apple, in contrast, spent $12.7 billion on capex last fiscal year and projects $14 billion for 2026, 2% of what its peers are spending. The conventional reading in Silicon Valley is, naturally, that Apple is losing. Siri has been a punchline for years — an internal executive called the delays ugly and embarrassing — and critics say that Apple has not been the same without Steve Jobs. It is falling behind, they say, and moving way too slowly for AI.

I disagree with this portrayal: Apple is the most powerful tech company in the world right now because it’s acting according to what it believes.

Some of you, I bet, will object to Romero’s notion that no one is “casually religious”. Almost everyone I know is casually religious, you might be thinking. But read the whole piece. What he’s saying is that if you’re “casually religious” those are just words. You’re not living your life according to your professed beliefs (casual or not). And that’s how most of Apple’s peer companies seem to be approaching AI.

I’m not sure he’s right, but he might be, and I think his take is at least closer to right than wrong. Apple is making an enormous bet on AI — but their bet is that they don’t need to spend hundreds of billions per year on AI infrastructure (most of it fattening Nvidia’s bottom line) to reap the benefits. If Apple’s right we should start seeing it come together tomorrow.

(Arguably we’ve already seen it coming together — demand for Apple’s products and services has gone up, not down, so far in the AI era. Entrenched leaders often grow during the initial stages of extinctive disruptions — BlackBerry’s biggest year for sales (revenue) and investor confidence (market cap) was 2011, four years after the iPhone debuted — but the disruptors are there. There’s not yet a single threat on the market to the iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, or AirPods — nor to Apple’s services revenue.)

Ben Sandofsky, writing on the Lux Camera blog:

After decades of shooting digital, I returned to analog photography in 2023. I thought it would be challenging, given the limited selection of film stocks, only to be surprised by how freeing it felt. It felt so much better to have a handful of amazing choices rather than photo-editor with thousands of presets. We owe that to film engineers who spent years developing versatile film stocks that work in a variety of situations.

Inspired by “Less, but better,” we partnered with the renowned Hollywood colorist Cullen Kelly to develop a succinct set of gorgeous, physically accurate processes exclusive to Halide. Each look was engineered with a specific intent. We verified every look thousands of times on real-world reference photos.

Put another way: every look is a banger.

Halide has always been a great — maybe the great — iPhone camera app for shooting RAW, with the intention of developing your images by hand in post. It’s a great camera technically and a great app UI-wise. Mark II introduced Process Zero, which, in their own description, “uses zero AI and zero computational photography to produce beautiful, film-like natural photos”. Process Zero was the first step toward the new built-in “looks” in Halide Mark III. I’ve been shooting with Mark III for a few weeks now, and they are, indeed, all bangers. And I really like that there aren’t that many of them. I wanted more looks than just Process Zero (which remains available, of course), but I feel a bit overwhelmed when faced with a dozen (or worse, dozens) of choices for processing. I feel conflicted enough having to choose between a handful of really good third-party camera apps with which to shoot in the first place — it’s worse when I have to make too many choices within the camera app itself.

What I want is to just point and shoot and be able to instantly share images with the look I want already applied. I’m picky but I’m also really lazy, and don’t want to do any editing in post on most of the shots I keep. But I do want to be able to edit in post if I want to, including changing the look losslessly. This mixture of point-and-shoot ease and pro-level control didn’t use to be possible. Now, though, it is, with apps like Not Boring Camera, Analogue, and, now, Halide Mark III.

It’s been a turbulent couple of months for Lux (to say the least), so I’m glad to see Sandofsky and team get Mark III out the door. If you, like me, had previously been impressed by Halide but didn’t use it because it required too much work in post, you should check out Mark III.

Lesley Stahl, Bill Whitaker, and Jon Wertheim, in a memo to the 60 Minutes staff obtained by The New York Times (gift links):

We have had a hard time deciding whether to stay at 60 Minutes. We’re still deeply upset by the firings of Tanya and Draggan, strong leaders who everyone respected. As far as we can tell — because no explanation has ever been offered, they were expelled because they fought for our 60 Minutes values and stood up to protect our independence and integrity.

Newsrooms are not supposed to be run like dictatorships. Collaboration and argument are the way we have always worked at 60. Don Hewitt actually encouraged loud passionate advocacy for our pieces. [...]

We feared that our returning might be construed as an endorsement of the existing power structure. That is simply, categorically not the case.

Here’s why we’re are staying:

We don’t want to see 60 Minutes die.

We’ll see how long this lasts.

Josh Marshall:

In a hearing today about the president’s bulldozing of the East Wing of the White House and plans to build a vast ballroom, a judge asked if the president could also bulldoze the Statue of Liberty and be subject to no legal challenge. The DOJ lawyer, Yaakov Roth, said that yes, President Trump could decide tomorrow to bulldoze the Statue of Liberty and no one could stop him.

It was a good question from DC Court of Appeals Judge Patricia Millett since it brings the arguments and their implications clearly into the open. Reframe the question and the absurdity of this proposition becomes even more clear. If you hire someone to administer your estate, can they burn down the buildings on your estate or chop it up into parcels and sell it off? Presumably not. You hired them to run it, not to destroy it or sell it. It’s not theirs. They were hired for a specific task. That person is your employee. The president is hired to administer the country and enforce its laws for four years. He doesn’t own the country or its properties.

Pathetic lickspittles, one and all.

Laura Hazard Owen, writing for Nieman Journalism Lab back in April:

I used Claude to help me scrape the 200 most recent tweets from 18 large publishers’ X accounts and track the engagement (likes + comments + retweets) on each. Six of those publishers have paywalls: Bloomberg, CNN, Forbes, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. Nine don’t: Al Jazeera English, AP, BBC, Breitbart News, CBS News, Daily Wire, Fox News, NBC News, and Reuters. The last three accounts I looked at — Leading Report, unusual_whales, and Globe Eye News — are not news publishers, but aggregate breaking news in tweets without links. (Here, for example, is an example of a Leading Report tweet: “BREAKING: Iran has halted direct talks with the US, per WSJ.” They’re sometimes referred to as engagement-maxing accounts.

These charts make it pretty clear that links in tweets hurt engagement. The connection was so apparent in my analysis that a graph including all 18 publishers is almost unreadable: The traditional, link-loving publishers are clustered in the bottom left corner (lots of links, little engagement) in a nearly indistinguishable mass of bubbles, no matter how large their followings are.

Musk’s Twitter/X is not an aggregator for news. It’s a walled garden. But the type of garden where you need to keep your eyes open and your hand on your wallet. Sometimes it’s fun to visit a seedy neighborhood. But let’s not pretend it isn’t a seedy neighborhood just because, long ago, it used to be nice.