New book, shipping May 19, from author Geoffrey Cain:

For twelve years, from 1985 to 1997, Jobs wandered the business wilderness with his new venture, NeXT. It was a period of spectacular failures, near-bankruptcy, and brutal humiliation. But out of this crucible of defeat emerged the visionary leader who would go on to create the iPod, iPhone, and iPad, transforming Apple into the most valuable company on earth.

Drawing on previously unpublished materials and new interviews with the key players, Geoffrey Cain reveals the untold story of Steve Jobs’s “lost decade” — the formative years that shaped the icon we thought we knew.

Afterword by Ed Catmull, who was obviously intimately familiar with Jobs in that era. And via Cain’s post on LinkedIn announcing the book, the foreword is by NeXT cofounder Dan’l Lewin.

When re-hanging signage, “Mind your P’s and Q’s” ought to be “Mind your H’s and S’s”.

Terry Godier, in a thoughtful essay on the design of RSS feed readers:

There’s a particular kind of guilt that visits me when I open my feed reader after a few days away. It’s not the guilt of having done something wrong, exactly. It’s more like the feeling of walking into a room where people have been waiting for you, except when you look around, the room is empty. There’s no one there. There never was.

I’ve been thinking about this feeling for a long time. Longer than I probably should, given that it concerns something as mundane as reading articles on the internet. But I’ve come to believe that these small, repeated experiences shape us more than we like to admit.

So let me start with a question that’s been nagging at me: why do RSS readers look like email clients?

There are good answers to that question, and for 20-some years I’ve used a feed reader — NetNewsWire — that looks like an email client. (To be honest, I wish my email client looked and worked more like NetNewsWire.) But the bigger question Godier is asking is why don’t more feed readers try something fundamentally different?

He’s answered his own question with Current, a new feed reader for iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

Emily Glazer, reporting for The Wall Street Journal:

The billionaire said he met with Epstein starting in 2011, years after Epstein had pleaded guilty in 2008 to soliciting a minor for prostitution. Gates said he was aware of some “18-month thing” that had limited Epstein’s travel but said he didn’t properly check his background. Gates said he continued meeting with Epstein even after his then-wife Melinda French Gates expressed concerns in 2013.

“Knowing what I know now makes it, you know, a hundred times worse in terms of not only his crimes in the past, but now it’s clear there was ongoing bad behavior,” Gates told staff. Speaking of his ex-wife, he added: “To give her credit, she was always kind of skeptical about the Epstein thing.”

“Kind of” is doing a lot of work there.

Greg Knauss:

People will argue that speaking English to LLMs is just another level of abstraction away from the physics of how the machine actually works. And while that’s technically true — the worst kind of true — it also misses the point. Industrialization fundamentally changes things, by quantum degrees. A Ding Dong from a factory is not the same thing as a gâteau au chocolat et crème chantilly from a baker which is not the same thing as cramming chunks of chocolate and scoops of whipped cream directly into your mouth while standing in front of the fridge at 2:00am. The level of care, of personalization, of intimacy — both given and taken — changes its nature. Digging a trench is a very different thing than telling someone to dig a trench. Assembling a clock is a very different thing than asking Siri for the time.

Splendid little essay.