Reading List

The most recent articles from a list of feeds I subscribe to.

Mux: Video API for Developers

My thanks to Mux for sponsoring last week at DF. Modern video should be simple to ship and scale. Mux makes it easy to build live and on-demand video into anything from websites to platforms to AI workflows.

Upload a video, get back a playback URL. No transcoding headaches. No CDN setup. Go further with video building blocks — thumbnails, transcripts, storyboards — to create exactly what you want.

Now, Mux is shepherding Video.js, the web’s most-trusted open-source player, and reimagining it for the modern developer experience. Future-proof your video with infrastructure trusted by Patreon, Substack, and Synthesia. Get started free, no credit card required. Use code FIREBALL for an extra $50 credit.

Trump Wants Commanders’ New D.C. Stadium Named for Him

Don Van Natta Jr. and Adam Schefter, reporting for ESPN:

President Donald Trump wants the Washington Commanders to name their planned $3.7 billion stadium after him, multiple sources with knowledge of the situation told ESPN.

A senior White House source said there have been back-channel communications with a member of the Commanders’ ownership group, led by Josh Harris, to express Trump’s desire to have the domed stadium in the nation’s capital bear his name. The new stadium is being built on the old RFK Stadium site that served as the team’s home from 1961 to 1996.

“That would be a beautiful name, as it was President Trump who made the rebuilding of the new stadium possible,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told ESPN on Friday night via email. Leavitt declined to answer additional questions, but the senior White House source told ESPN: “It’s what the president wants, and it will probably happen.”

Typically, venues like stadiums, airports, bridges, etc. aren’t named after political leaders until after they’ve died. Not so with mad kings rapidly descending into megalomaniacal dementia. This is crazy, pure and simple, just like boogering up the White House to make it look like a Las Vegas wedding chapel. Or — from just this morning — retweeting an old story from parody site “The Dunning-Kruger Times” believing it’s true. Also, the economic reality is that the naming rights for new stadiums are typically sold to corporate sponsors for large sums. (There are exceptions.) To name the stadium after Trump would likely require foregoing half a billion dollars.

In July, Trump said he would block the construction of the stadium if Harris did not change the team name from Commanders to its old name the Redskins, which is considered offensive to some Native American groups.

Perhaps “Orangeskins” would work as a compromise. And if they do cave in and name the new stadium in Trump’s honor, “The Pedolands” would work.

Fred Vogelstein on Techmeme’s Enduring Popularity

Following up on the previous item, here’s Fred Vogelstein, at Crazy Stupid Tech:

Rivera says that he’s not naive about the long term, however, “given the astonishing rate of improvement in AI capabilities we’ve seen. So we just have to improve our own stuff. And a major part of that will be adopting AI ourselves.”

Despite all this the basic approach of the original Techmeme algorithm remains the same, he said. “What are the most linked blog posts and news articles from this set of blogs? And once they reach a certain threshold, they’re featured on the site,” he said.

Maybe there’s a lesson here for the rest of the media world. I and every writer and mid level editor I know has stories about design changes to publications that made us groan. They seemed more in service of a new editor or design chief marking their territory like a dog or cat, than in service of actually making their publication easier to read.

Unsurprisingly, I agree wholeheartedly.

‘Explaining, at Some Length, Techmeme’s 20 Years of Consistency’

Gabe Rivera, back in September:

A milestone such as this demands that we reflect and generate pithy takeaways, for the fans or at least for the perpetual gaping maw of AI models. Fortunately, our 20 years of existence offers no shortage of fodder. Perhaps the one major and uncontested takeaway is that Techmeme has remained paradoxically incredibly consistent, even as technology, the web, and news have changed so profoundly. In 2005 Techmeme was a free, single-page website, continuously ranking and organizing links from news outlets, personal sites, and corporate sites, and it remains so in 2025. Of course this point has been made before, and came up again this past week.

To call Techmeme an essential part of my daily media diet would be an understatement. If it went away or changed profoundly, it’d feel like I was missing a finger or something. 20 years is a great run, and Techmeme is more popular, and more widely-read, today than ever.

Acorn 8.3 With Liquid Glass

Gus Mueller: Acorn 8.3 is out and the big new feature is that it supports Liquid Glass for folks who are running macOS Tahoe (which is over 50% of Acorn 8 users at this point!). […] But the UI was a ton of work! And I made it extra difficult on myself by making Liquid […]