Joe Rosensteel:

I have no plan to purchase a GM vehicle, but I do rent cars. GM makes up a sizable portion of rental car fleets. At some point in the future those cars will no longer support CarPlay. I’m not going to sign up for a GM federated ID that stores my login credentials in their cloud. I’m not going to individually sign into apps in the car like Google Maps with my Google ID that I use for way more than just navigation. There’s no chain of trust with me and this random car from GM. No convenience that is achieved in exchange for increased exposure risk for storing my sensitive data in a car I don’t own.

If GM goes through with this abandonment of CarPlay, I don’t see how they’ll continue to sell any vehicles to rental agencies. I would never rent a car without CarPlay, and I would never consider signing up for a GM cloud service just to drive a rental car. Complete dealbreakers.

Tom Ellison, at McSweeney’s:

How are my competitors doing, the ones you all insisted students use instead of me? That’s right, they were supposed to go to the American Journal of Social Sciences, Powered by OpenAI. Or museums, like the Smithsonian’s Charlie Kirk Shrine to American Greatness. I guess they can still count on credible journalism, once they get past the paywall for Palantir Presents: The Washington Post, so they read the Pulitzer-Bezos Prize–winning work of coeditors-in-chief Bari Weiss and Grok.

Jay Peters, writing for The Verge:

However, despite Elon Musk promising that Grokipedia would be a “massive improvement” over Wikipedia, some articles appear to be cribbing information from Wikipedia. At the bottom of the page for the MacBook Air, for example, you can see this message: “The content is adapted from Wikipedia, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.” In some cases, the cribbing goes farther than a rewrite: I’ve also seen that message on pages for the PlayStation 5 and the Lincoln Mark VIII, and both of those pages are almost identical — word-for-word, line-for-line — to their Wikipedia counterparts.

“Even Grokipedia needs Wikipedia to exist,” Lauren Dickinson, a spokesperson for the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit that operates Wikipedia tells The Verge. You can read Dickinson’s full statement in full at the end of this article.

At launch, Grokipedia is to Wikipedia as a chewed piece of gum is to a fresh piece of gum still in its wrapper. And imagine that the gum was chewed by someone with a dipping tobacco habit.

Nick Vadala, reporting for the Philadelphia Inquirer:

Longtime WMMR-FM host Pierre Robert was found dead in his home Wednesday. He was 70.

Robert’s surname, I must point out, rhymes with Pierre (and with Colbert).

A native of Northern California, Robert joined WMMR as an on-air host in 1981. He arrived in the city after his previous station, San Francisco’s KSAN, switched to an Urban Cowboy format, prompting him to make the cross-country drive to Philadelphia in a Volkswagen van. “I came because of a relationship,” he told The Inquirer last year. “I was in love. The love part didn’t work out, but the job part did.”

As a newly minted Philadelphian, Robert began working at a local health food store as he interviewed for radio jobs around town, but found little luck initially. One day, while dining at Astral Plane, a long-closed restaurant formerly on Lombard Street, he introduced himself to WMMR program director Joe Bonnadonna and announcer Charlie Kendall, and despite getting on well with the pair, he learned there were no openings at the station.

But weeks later, he received a letter from Bonnadonna, and interviewed for a job at the station during a concert from Philly rock band The Hooters at the Chestnut Cabaret. He soon started working in the station’s music library and office making $3.50 an hour, and later began appearing on the air.

There’s no more Philadelphia a Philadelphia origin story than a radio host interviewing for his job during a Hooters concert at the Chestnut Cabaret — and then going on to stay at the same station for 44 years. Impossible for me to overstate just how much Robert’s voice was the voice of music for me and my entire friend group growing up and even through college. You tuned the dial to 93.3 FM and left it there.

My favorite bit of his was an obscure one, a character named Reginald the Butler. Robert always had Reginald on during the holidays, while spinning Christmas rock songs. But here’s a classic segment from 1988 with Robert and Reginald interviewing David Lee Roth, who was then on a solo tour and about to play the Spectrum.

Rest in peace, my fellow citizen.

Holly Borla: In Swift 6.2, the Foundation library includes a modern NotificationCenter API that uses concrete notification types instead of relying on strings and untyped dictionaries for notification names and payloads. This means you can define a notification struct with stored properties, and observers can use the type without error-prone indexing and dynamic casting. Apple: […]