Reading List
The most recent articles from a list of feeds I subscribe to.
Filing: Chinese AI chip startup Biren raises ~$717M in its Hong Kong IPO; institutional and retail tranches were oversubscribed ~26x and ~2,348x, respectively (Himanshi Akhand/Reuters)
Himanshi Akhand / Reuters:
Filing: Chinese AI chip startup Biren raises ~$717M in its Hong Kong IPO; institutional and retail tranches were oversubscribed ~26x and ~2,348x, respectively — Chinese AI chip startup Shanghai Biren Technology (6082.HK) has raised HK$5.58 billion ($716.85 million) in its Hong Kong initial public offering …
Unsealed documents detail a US operation that stopped the alleged smuggling of $160M worth of Nvidia H100 and H200 GPUs to China between Oct. 2024 and May 2025 (CNBC)
CNBC:
Unsealed documents detail a US operation that stopped the alleged smuggling of $160M worth of Nvidia H100 and H200 GPUs to China between Oct. 2024 and May 2025 — On Dec. 8, Federal prosecutors in Texas unsealed documents that revealed an investigation into a massive smuggling network that stretched across the U.S. and the world.
3 movie masterpieces buried on Amazon Prime Video to watch right now
Photoshop 1.0 and the Early Macintosh HIG
After posting a link to the Computer History Museum’s release of the Photoshop 1.0 source code last week, I spent some time paging through the original Photoshop manuals. I found a screenshot of the dialog box where you entered your serial number, and posted it to Mastodon, writing:
If you’re annoyed by something that is obviously wrong about this dialog box from Photoshop 1.0, you’re my type of person. (Even more so if, like me, you remember being annoyed by this at the time, when you were entering your cracked SN.)
What a lovely thread it generated, replete with screenshots from early versions of the HIG.
Sidenote: I would eat my hat if Alan Dye knew what was wrong and gross about this dialog box. This is exactly the sort of sweating the idiomatic usability details thing that has frequently been wrong in Apple software in the last decade. The response from Dye and those in his cohort would be, I’d wager, to roll their eyes with a “Who gives a shit what the UI guidelines were forty fucking years ago?” dismissal. Here’s the thing. Styles have changed as time has marched on. Technical capabilities — screen resolution, color — have marched on. But the fundamental idioms of good Macintosh UI design are timeless (and many of them ought to apply to Apple’s other platforms). These idioms are like grammar. Slang changes. Language forever moves forward. But many important idioms are so fundamental they do not change. Styles and technical advances have advanced over time in filmmaking and print design too, but the basic principles of good cinema and graphic layout are timeless. Only a fool dismisses the collective knowledge passed down by those who came before us.
‘The Strange Death of Make America Great Again’
Matthew Walther, in an opinion piece last week for The New York Times (gift link):
MAGA’s internal culture has always rewarded theatrical confrontation over achievement. Boorishness commands attention, and boors mistake attention for leverage. Pseudo-martyrdom becomes an end in itself. Loyalty tests proliferate. Those who counsel de-escalation find themselves subject to denunciation; prudential disagreement is allowed to provide cover for rank bigotry. Partisans celebrate one another for exacerbating tensions even when exacerbation forecloses coalition building.
There is also a related problem: The Trumpist movement has generated a lunatic array of semiautonomous online subcultures that are largely indifferent to strategic considerations and immune from political consequences while still exercising influence over actors whose decisions are not so immune. The disappearance of the informal gate-keeping function once performed by conservative luminaries such as William F. Buckley Jr. is probably permanent. In the absence of such authority, informed argument exists alongside phony outrage, profiteering, self-aggrandizement and saying things for the hell of it. The result is not merely the radicalization that Mr. Buckley feared but a kind of omnidirectional incoherence.
“A kind of omnidirectional incoherence” is as perfect a description as I’ve seen regarding the whole Trumpist movement in this second administration.