Indeed do many things come to pass

Posted by John Gruber

https://daringfireball.net/2026/04/nyt_wrong_crossword_grid

The New York Times PR account, on Twitter/X a week ago:

Sunday’s crossword puzzle in the print edition of The New York Times Magazine contains a grid that does not match the clues. The correct version of the puzzle can be found in the news section of Sunday’s print edition of The Times. The puzzle on our app is correct.

Maggie Duffy, writing for Vulture:

Some solvers who, like Wegener’s wife, complete the Sunday puzzle in the print magazine (often with pen) complained on crossword forums and social media, saying they were “nearly in tears,” some with fears of “sudden onset dementia” or, worse yet, ineptitude.

For Irene Papoulis, a former writing instructor at Trinity College, the puzzle is typically a source of pride. “It didn’t even occur to me that it could be their mistake,” she told me. “I just blamed myself.” When Mike McFadden, in New Jersey, couldn’t crack it, he had a similar reaction. “I thought something was wrong with me,” he told me. “I didn’t think that they would have an error.” It nagged at him all day. At a function on Saturday, he couldn’t bring himself to mention it to his brother-in-law, a fellow solver; he was still too upset.

Some had such trust in the crossword that they believed the erroneous grid was purposeful. “I’m saying to myself, ‘Okay, maybe there’s some sort of scientific or mathematical trick,’” McFadden said. When I spoke with Will Shortz, the Times’ crossword editor, he said the Times does “so many tricks with the puzzles” that he could see how someone’s first thought would be “I wonder what they’re up to now?”

This is the first such mistake the Times has made in the 84 years that they’ve been printing a crossword puzzle. I came of age doing work in print — writing and editing The Triangle, the student newspaper at Drexel, and then spending a few years as a working graphic designer, at a time when print still ruled. There’s an inherent stress about going to press. Mistakes are forever. We once ran a headline at The Triangle that read “Headline Goes Here”. Once. Going to press is stressful but exhilarating. There’s an adrenaline rush that comes with giving the go-ahead to start a very expensive large-scale full-color press run. The stress focuses the mind.

Print, effectively, is hardware. Atoms, not bits. The web is literally software. If you make a mistake in software that results in incorrect mathematical results, you ship an update. If you make a mistake in a CPU such that it results in incorrect floating-point math, perhaps only in 1 out of every 9 billion calculations, people will remember the mistake 30 years later.

If The New York Times had run the wrong crossword grid on the web or in their app, they would have corrected the error quickly, few people would have encountered it, and fewer still would remember it. But by printing the wrong grid in the Sunday magazine last week, they made a mistake that some people will never forget (and some will never forgive).

Hardware brain is different from software brain. Software brain says Go faster; do more; the only mistake you can’t fix is having gone too slow. Hardware brain says Slow down; do less; focus; strive for perfection and never settle for less than excellence; mistakes are forever.

If his background in hardware means that incoming Apple CEO John Ternus has hardware brain, and will lead Apple accordingly, that suggests Apple will double down on zigging in the midst of a still-escalating AI hype cycle that has the rest of the industry zagging ever more frenetically. That feels right to me.

https://daringfireball.net/2026/04/nyt_wrong_crossword_grid

Posted by John Gruber

https://9to5google.com/2026/04/22/samsung-is-increasingly-worried-about-first-ever-mobile-division-loss-in-ram-crisis-report/

Ben Schoon, 9to5Google:

In March, a report revealed some of the internal cuts Samsung has been making for its mobile division, with the company initially concerned it could post an operating loss for the first time ever. It’s a big deal, as Samsung’s mobile (MX) division has historically always turned a profit.

A new report out of Korea (via Jukan) makes this seem all but certain.

Apparently, Samsung’s TM Roh, the head of the company’s mobile division, has expressed concerns of the “possibility of an annual deficit for the MX business unit.” Previously, those concerns came from speculation and outside parties, but with such a high figure in Samsung’s organization worried, it’s clear things are looking pretty bleak.

Back in 2013 analysts pegged the profit share of the handset industry at 70 percent for Apple and 30 percent for Samsung. A lot of other smaller companies sold a lot of other phones, but, so that analysis went, none of them made any profits. A lot of them were losing money. I linked to another such analysis in 2016 that pegged Apple’s share of phone profits at 104 percent, estimating that all other handset makers combined accounted for a 4% percent loss.

Doesn’t seem like much has changed since then. I prompted ChatGPT and Gemini today with this request: “Create a table of the world’s mobile device makers, ranked by profit and profit share of the industry.” ChatGPT pegs Apple’s profit share at 75–85%, Samsung’s at 10–20%, Huawei and Xiaomi in “low single digits”, and everyone else negligible. Gemini pegs Apple’s share at 85–90%, Samsung’s at 7–10%, Xiaomi at 1-2%, and everyone else negligible. This, despite both ChatGPT and Gemini agreeing that iPhones comprise only 20 percent of sales by unit. (Are ChatGPT and Gemini correct about the current profit share split of the mobile industry? I don’t know. But both cite sources in their answers, and it strikes me as very unlikely that their estimates are very far off.)

If Samsung posts a mobile division loss this year, it could be the case that Apple will capture 100 percent of the profits in the phone industry with just 20 percent of the sales.

https://9to5google.com/2026/04/22/samsung-is-increasingly-worried-about-first-ever-mobile-division-loss-in-ram-crisis-report/