Tim Cook: Mac just had its best launch week ever for first-time Mac customers. We love seeing the enthusiasm! Joe Rossignol (Hacker News): Apple also released MacBook Air models with the M5 chip and MacBook Pro models with M5 Pro and M5 Max chips last week, so it was a big week for new Macs, […]

John Gruber (Hacker News): But just using the Neo, without any consideration that it’s memory limited, I haven’t noticed a single hitch. I’m not quitting apps I otherwise wouldn’t quit, or closing Safari tabs I wouldn’t otherwise close. I’m just working — with an even dozen apps open as I type this sentence — and everything feels snappy. […] […]

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, during an on-stage interview at The Hill & Valley Forum last week, was asked “What do you see as America’s unique advantages that other countries don’t have?”

His answer, after taking a moment to think, “America’s unique advantage that no country could possibly have is President Trump.”

Huang, newly appointed to the aforelinked President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, seemingly doesn’t smell the growing stink.

The White House:

The Council will be co-chaired by David Sacks and Michael Kratsios. The following individuals have been appointed:

Marc Andreessen
Sergey Brin
Safra Catz
Michael Dell
Jacob DeWitte
Fred Ehrsam
Larry Ellison
David Friedberg
Jensen Huang
John Martinis
Bob Mumgaard
Lisa Su
Mark Zuckerberg

Under President Trump, PCAST will focus on topics related to the opportunities and challenges that emerging technologies present to the American workforce, and ensuring all Americans thrive in the Golden Age of Innovation.

Scientific American observes that 12/13 are executives, and only one, Martinis, is an academic researcher. But I mean, of course a council like this, from this administration, is going to be made up of big-cap corporate executives and founders. I’d say it’s more surprising there is even one academic researcher than that there aren’t more.

I’m more intrigued by the companies who aren’t represented: no one from Apple, no one from Microsoft, no one from Amazon. (That left room for two from Oracle, that well known bastion of corporate virtue.) Read into that what you will. Me, I can’t help but suspect that this administration is taking on a profound stink, and something like appointments to this council are akin to a game of music chairs where Tim Cook, Satya Nadella, Andy Jassy, and Jeff Bezos are happy not to have gotten seats.

Thereallo, after spelunking inside the APK bundle for the Android version:

• Has a full GPS tracking pipeline compiled in that polls every 4.5 minutes in the foreground and 9.5 minutes in the background, syncing lat/lng/accuracy/timestamp to OneSignal’s servers.

• Loads JavaScript from a random person’s GitHub Pages site (lonelycpp.github.io) for YouTube embeds. If that account is compromised, arbitrary code runs in the app’s WebView. [...]

Is any of this illegal? Probably not. Is it what you’d expect from an official government app? Probably not either.

Hanlon’s razor: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”

The app is, at least temporarily, popular. As I type this it’s #3 in the iOS App Store top free apps list, sandwiched between Claude and Gemini. I don’t know how similar the iOS app is to the Android one, but I took one for the team and installed it, and after poking around for a few minutes, it hasn’t even prompted me to ask for location access. It’s a crappy app, to be sure. A lot of flashing between screen transitions. When you open an article, there’s a “< Back” button top left, and an “X” button top right. Both buttons seem to do the same thing. There’s no share sheet for “news” articles, which seems particularly stupid. You can’t even copy a link to an article and share it manually.

But the iOS version has a clean privacy report card in the App Store, and I don’t see anything in the app that makes me doubt that. It seems like the Android version is quite different.

Update 1: Someone on Reddit claims to have analyzed the iOS app bundle and discovered similar code as in the Android app, but I still don’t see any way to actually get the iOS app to even ask for location permission. I think there might be code in the app that never gets called. Like I wrote above, it’s clearly not a well-crafted app. If anyone knows how to get the iOS app to actually ask for location access, let me know how. Here’s another analysis of the iOS app.

Update 2: I installed the Android version of the app too, and just like on iOS, the only permission it asks for is to send notifications. Maybe they will in a future software update, but as far as I can see, the app never even tries to check the device’s location, on either platform.