Christian Tietze (Mastodon): InfiniteCanvas is a simple, delightful “whiteboarding” app. It’s not for fine art, but for conceptual drawings, and gets out of your way so that you can get ideas on the (digital) paper quickly. […] Infinite Canvas is like Prezi (the presentation app) for drawings: you can nest drawings ‘inside’ others by zooming […]

I recently replaced a 4 TB 2.5-inch hard drive with a same-sized SSD, with the goal of making it quieter and faster. Instead, it got much slower. As far as I can tell, there’s nothing wrong with the SSD itself (a Samsung T7). The drive tests fine, and I have half a dozen other drives […]

Colin Cornaby: I’ve submitted the issue described in this post to Apple as FB13375033. This issue has been open since September of 2023.If you game on a MacBook display – your game is probably rendering wrong unless you’ve adjusted your settings. If you’re a developer building a full screen game in AppKit (or Catalyst) – […]

Alexandra Alper, reporting for Reuters:

Donald Trump’s Navy and Air Force are poised to cancel two nearly complete software projects that took 12 years and well over $800 million combined to develop, work initially aimed at overhauling antiquated human resources systems.

The reason for the unusual move: officials at those departments, who have so far put the existing projects on hold, want other firms, including Salesforce and billionaire Peter Thiel’s Palantir, to have a chance to win similar projects, which could amount to a costly do-over, according to seven sources familiar with the matter.

I don’t want to be a ninny about this, but why is Reuters flatly describing the Navy and Air Force as possessions of the president? Did they ever describe them as belonging to Joe Biden, or Barack Obama? I don’t think they did, and a cursory search suggests they did not, but even if they did, it was wrong then. Now is not the time for sloppy language around this.

Anyway, this is both as crooked and stupid as shit.

See also: Jessie Blaeser, reporting for Politico:

The Trump administration’s claim that it is saving billions of dollars through DOGE-related cuts to federal contracts is drastically exaggerated, according to a new Politico analysis of public data and federal spending records.

Through July, DOGE said it has saved taxpayers $52.8 billion by canceling contracts, but of the $32.7 billion in actual claimed contract savings that Politico could verify, DOGE’s savings over that period were closer to $1.4 billion. Despite the administration’s claims, not a single one of those 1.4 billion dollars will lower the federal deficit unless Congress steps in. Instead, the money has been returned to agencies mandated by law to spend it.

The DOGE scam was never about saving money. It was about destroying honest government programs and projects to redirect the firehose of taxpayer money to American oligarchs like Thiel, one of Elon Musk’s “PayPal Mafia” cronies.

The Information (paywalled, alas):

In December, Perplexity discussed possibly buying the six-year-old The Browser Co. with that company’s leaders, according to two people with knowledge of the discussions. Talks with the company, which operates an AI-powered web browser, Dia, did not progress, and no price was discussed.

OpenAI has also spoken to The Browser Co. executives about possibly selling to the ChatGPT creator, according to two people familiar with the discussions. Those discussions went further, to the point of a possible price, but ended after the two sides couldn’t agree on terms.

Then, earlier this summer, Perplexity offered to buy Brave, a San Francisco–based company that runs a privacy-focused web browser and search engine, for around $1 billion, primarily in Perplexity’s stock, according to a person with direct knowledge of the situation. But the two sides couldn’t agree on price and the deal discussions didn’t move forward, the person said.

Meanwhile, investors in Perplexity and DuckDuckGo tried to arrange meetings between the two companies’ leaders, according to people close to the companies. Perplexity CEO Srinivas and Gabriel Weinberg, CEO of 17-year-old DuckDuckGo, met and discussed Perplexity’s interest in acquiring browsers as a way of reaching more consumers, one of the people said. The conversations didn’t lead to any offer.

DuckDuckGo is even more privacy-focused than Brave. It’s their entire brand. Perplexity isn’t privacy-focused at all. And Perplexity has already made their own browser, Comet, which is so cool you currently have to pay $200/month to get access to it. Comet is, unsurprisingly, forked from Chromium, and pretty much looks like an uglier version of Chrome. Brave Browser looks almost exactly like Chrome (and is probably my favorite Chromium-based browser).

None of this makes any sense, so it’s no surprise most of these talks didn’t go far, and Brave rejected the supposed $1 billion offer in Perplexity stock, which as far as I’m concerned might as well have been $1 billion in Monopoly money. Why not call Eddy Cue and see if Apple wants to sell Safari?

Update: Just today, Perplexity announced that Comet is now available to $20/month Plus users, not just $200/month Pro users.