Tina Nguyen at The Verge:

I interviewed an enthusiastic crypto trader who figured out how to win the contest without losing any money: buy enough $TRUMP to get onto the leaderboard — and then in a separate wallet on a separate exchange, buy $TRUMP perpetual futures that would be profitable if (or as he saw it, when) the value of $TRUMP dropped. Yes, he did The Big Short, except with Donald Trump’s meme coin. “Bet you 10 percent of dinner participants are doing this,” he told me before the contest ended. “Everyone knows $TRUMP price will fall inevitably as more supply comes online in the future and gets dumped on retail.”

Fascinating interview — half hilarious, half infuriating.

Here’s a spoof commercial from the 1990 movie Crazy People, starring Dudley Moore and Daryl Hannah, which TMDB synopsizes:

A bitter ad executive, who has reached his breaking point, finds himself in a mental institution, where his career actually begins to thrive with the help of the hospital’s patients.

The New York Times would have you believe this is relevant to Apple’s supply chain reliance on China.

Julia Carrie Wong, a reporter for the Guardian, has a whole thread over on Bluesky digging into the bizarre “young Chinese women have small fingers” line in Tripp Mickle’s New York Times story that tries to pretend that maybe sorta kinda Apple could assemble iPhones in the US. Mickle attributed the claim to “supply chain experts said”. Times spokesperson Charlie Stadtlander emailed Wong a statement that included the following:

Our reporting does not make racial or genetic generalizations, but simply cites experts who have experience with the industrial process in U.S. and Chinese factories.

I didn’t write my piece on Mickle’s story until about a day after it appeared, and I fully expected while I was writing it that the Times would have removed or significantly edited that goofy claim. But no, it was still there Saturday, and it’s still there today. They’re standing behind it.

You know how Peter Navarro — Trump’s crook of an economic advisor who is the mastermind behind this whole tariffs thing — wrote a book that cited a purported expert named Ron Vara, and it turns out Ron Vara doesn’t exist and his name is just a dumb anagram for “Navarro”? I’m thinking maybe the “supply chain experts” behind this notion that Apple assembles iPhones in China because “young Chinese women have small fingers” are the well-known supply chain masterminds Mipp Trickle and Trick Mipple.

David Heinemeier Hansson (last week):

Thanks to their fight for Fortnite, app developers everywhere are now allowed to link out of apps to their own web-based payment system in the US store (but, sadly, nowhere else yet).

This is all we ever wanted from Apple: to have a way to distribute our iPhone apps and keep the customer relationship by billing directly. The 30% toll gets all the attention, and it is ludicrously egregious, but to us, it’s just as much about retaining that direct customer relationship, so we can help folks with refunds, so they don’t tie their billing for a multi-platform email system to a single manufacturer.

Here’s Sarah Perez at TechCrunch, the day prior to DHH’s announcement:

Following the decision, Apple updated its App Store policies for the U.S., and apps, including Spotify, Amazon Kindle, and Patreon quickly rolled out new versions of their apps to take advantage of the new functionality.

None of these apps were using Apple’s in-app payments. Users simply couldn’t sign up for paid tiers (or in Kindle’s case, buy books) from inside the apps. This is a win for users, and Apple won’t lose a cent from commissions from any of these apps.

My thanks to Drata for sponsoring this last week at DF. Their message is short and sweet: Automate compliance. Streamline security. Manage risk. Drata delivers the world’s most advanced Trust Management platform.