Since its launch in 2007, the Wii has seen several operating systems ported to it: Linux, NetBSD, and most-recently, Windows NT. Today, Mac OS X joins that list.

In this post, I’ll share how I ported the first version of Mac OS X, 10.0 Cheetah, to the Nintendo Wii. If you’re not an operating systems expert or low-level engineer, you’re in good company; this project was all about learning and navigating countless “unknown unknowns”. Join me as we explore the Wii’s hardware, bootloader development, kernel patching, and writing drivers - and give the PowerPC versions of Mac OS X a new life on the Nintendo Wii.

This very in-depth blog post is well worth a read. Most impressive to me was getting IOkit drivers running on the Wii’s custom SoC.

Developed by a research team led by Professor Chen Jiehua from Wuhan University’s Satellite Navigation and Positioning Technology Research Centre, the clock only loses a second every 30,000 years, according to the official newspaper Changjiang Daily.

The device measures just 2.3 cubic cm (0.14 cubic inch), less than one-seventh the size of the leading US models and about the size of a fingernail.

“Even if traditional atomic clocks are miniaturised, the minimum volume limit is still several hundred cubic centimetres and the minimum power consumption is at least several watts,” Chen told the newspaper.

According to Chen, the US has produced a 17 cubic cm product, but his team’s clock has a comparable performance even though it is much smaller.

“We have achieved mass production of chip-scale atomic clocks, successfully applying them to time synchronisation systems such as micro-PNT [positioning, navigation and timing], underwater BeiDou [China’s equivalent of GPS], low-orbit satellites and drone swarms.”

In recent years, my iPhone display was always covered in subtle scratches that you only really noticed in low lighting – like indoors. They were especially visible when the screen was off. I’m convinced this is why always-on display was invented.

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Apple changed the formula with the iPhone 17 line. The company says Ceramic Shield 2 cover glass is three times more resistant to scratching. That’s exactly what the iPhone has needed, and Ceramic Shield 2 is on every new model.

The improved formula for Ceramic Shield 2 has definitely followed through on its promise of being more scratch resistant. It normally takes about a month for the screen of my iPhone to become covered in small scratches. The same way Zac describes them, visible with the screen off but invisible with the screen on.

As of today I see absolutely none. The front glass of my iPhone 17 Pro Max looks as new as the day I received the device. Here’s to hoping that future iterations don’t result in a regression in this regard, as has been the case in the past.

In December, the Federal Communications Commission banned all future drones made in foreign countries from being imported into the United States, unless or until their maker gets an exemption. Now, the FCC has done the exact same for consumer networking gear, citing “an unacceptable risk to the national security of the United States and to the safety and security of U.S. persons.”

If you already have a Wi-Fi or wired router, you can keep on using it – and foreign companies that have already gotten FCC radio authorization for a specific product can continue to import that product.

But since the vast majority – if not all – consumer routers are manufactured outside the United States, the vast majority of future consumer routers are now banned. By adding all foreign-made consumer routers to its Covered List, the FCC is saying it will no longer authorize their radios, which de facto bans new devices from import into the country.

Now, router makers need to A) secure a “conditional approval” that lets them keep getting new products cleared for US entry while they work to convince the government that they’ll open up manufacturing in the US, or B) make the decision to skip selling future products in the US, like dronemaker DJI already did.

Like with the foreign drone ban, the FCC has a National Security Determination that it says justifies these actions, one which claims that “Allowing routers produced abroad to dominate the U.S. market creates unacceptable economic, national security, and cybersecurity risks,” and that “routers produced abroad were directly implicated in the Volt, Flax, and Salt Typhoon cyberattacks which targeted critical American communications, energy, transportation, and water infrastructure.”

Today it’s widely acknowledged that the future of computing will involve the quantum realm. Companies like Google, Microsoft, IBM, and a few well-funded startups are frantically building quantum computers and routinely claiming advances that seem to bring this exotic, world-changing technology within reach. In 1979 all of this was unthinkable. But that summer, two scientists met in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Puerto Rico, and their aquatic conversation led to a body of work that created quantum information theory. In a larger sense, their contributions helped bring computer science into the quantum age.

Those water-logged scientists, Charles Bennett and Gilles Brassard, are now the latest recipients of the ACM A.M. Turing Award, the Nobel Prize of the field.

Arizona filed criminal charges Tuesday against Kalshi, accusing the popular prediction market of hosting bets on state and federal elections.

“Kalshi may brand itself as a ‘prediction market,’ but what it’s actually doing is running an illegal gambling operation and taking bets on Arizona elections, both of which violate Arizona law,” said Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes. “No company gets to decide for itself which laws to follow.”

Kalshi is facing four counts of election wagering, a Class 2 misdemeanor, for taking bets on the 2028 presidential race, the 2026 Arizona gubernatorial race, the 2026 Arizona Republican gubernatorial primary and the 2026 Arizona secretary of state race. It faces 16 additional Class 1 misdemeanors for wagering on events like Arizona college sports, professional sports and whether the SAVE America Act — a collection of bills intended to crack down on voter fraud — will become federal law.

There are currently about twenty federal lawsuits against Kalshi, and you can expect more states to follow suit with Arizona. The idea that this company is allowed to operate an unregulated gambling website is just insane to me.

Technology journalist Joanna Stern will join NBC News as part of a new partnership between the reporter and the news organization, an arrangement that seems to be increasingly popular as more news personnel test out creator-driven ventures.

Stern, who recently departed The Wall Street Journal to pursue an independent business, will create what NBC News billed as “premium multimedia content” and also contribute reporting across NBC News platforms , as well as the NBCUniversal division’s its newly launched subscription product. Her efforts will include vertical videos, explainers and investigative stories, newsletters created by her own business; a new franchise series called “AI in America” that will appear across various NBC News outlets.

As traditional media outlets and linear broadcasters see their reach and revenues falling, individuals are realizing their name recognition and audience is more valuable. Joanna Stern is a perfect example. For years I paid for a Wall Street Journal subscription largely so I could access the articles and videos she published. There were rumors circulating that Bari Weiss offered her a seven figure contract to join CBS News, but thankfully we know now that isn’t happening.

We are extremely excited to share that MotionVFX is joining the Apple team to continue to empower creators and editors to do their best work.

For over 15 years, we’ve been on a mission to create world-class, visually inspiring content and effects for video editors. From the very beginning, we’ve been all about quality, ease of use, and great design. These are also the values that we admire most in Apple’s products, and we’re thrilled to be able to embrace them together.

We’d like to take this opportunity to thank all our amazing customers and supporters who have been with us through all these years. You inspired us, you challenged us, and you helped our products become what they are today. We are incredibly grateful to be part of this amazing community and excited to continue our work to serve you.

This is the beginning of something truly wonderful!

I take this as a very positive sign since Final Cut Pro and Motion have transitioned to a recurring subscription model as part of the Creator Studio bundle. Apple simply cannot make that ask of customers while keeping app updates at the glacial pace they have been for the past two decades. First Pixelmator, now MotionVFX, and you can expect many more to follow.

Among the artifacts recently accessioned into the Museum’s permanent collection is an authenticated iPhone 17 Pro used during an Apple TV broadcast of Friday Night Baseball. The Sept. 26, 2025 matchup between the Boston Red Sox and Detroit Tigers incorporated live game footage from four devices, marking the first use of an iPhone as a primary camera in a professional sports broadcast.

I can see this becoming a trend for a variety of sports just given the always-on connectivity of the iPhone paired with industry leading video and audio quality.

Fifty years ago in a small garage, a big idea was born. Apple was founded on the simple notion that technology should be personal, and that belief — radical at the time — changed everything.

April 1st marks 50 years of Apple. From the first Apple computer to the Mac, from iPod to iPhone, iPad to Apple Watch and AirPods, as well as the services we use every day — the App Store, Apple Music, Apple Pay, iCloud, and Apple TV — we’ve spent five decades rethinking what’s possible and putting powerful tools into people’s hands. Through every breakthrough, one idea has guided us — that the world is moved forward by people who think different.

That’s because progress always begins with someone — an inventor or scientist, a student or storyteller — who imagines a better way, a new idea, a different path. That spirit has guided Apple from the start. But it has never belonged to us alone.

Every invention we bring into the world is just the beginning of a story. The most meaningful chapters are written by all of you — the people who use our technology to work, learn, dream, and discover. You’ve made breakthroughs and launched businesses. You’ve cheered up loved ones in the hospital and captured your toddler’s first steps. You’ve run marathons, written books, and rekindled friendships. You’ve chased your curiosity, found your new favorite song, and shared stories that connect us all.

In your hands, the tools we make have improved lives, and sometimes even saved them. And that is what inspires us — not what technology can do alone, but everything you can do with it.

At Apple, we’re more focused on building tomorrow than remembering yesterday. But we couldn’t let this milestone pass without thanking the millions of people who make Apple what it is today — our incredible teams around the world, our developer community, and every customer who has joined us on this journey. Your ideas inspire our work. Your trust drives us to do better. Your stories remind us of all we can accomplish when we think different.

If you’ve taught us anything, it’s that the people crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.

So here’s to the crazy ones.

The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently.

Here’s to you.

Tim Cook

This letter would land quite differently if Cook hadn’t spend the past year running Apple’s name into the dirt by kissing Trump’s butt. The company also published an uninformative newsroom post claiming more to come over the next few weeks leading up to the 50th anniversary on April 1st.

David Pogue moderated a great panel for Computer History Museum last night marking the anniversary, the video is now available on their YouTube channel and well worth watching.

Dozens of employees at Ford’s Chicago Assembly plant, in the pope’s hometown, worked on a custom 2026 Ford Exploder Platinum hybrid, which CEO Jim Farley and his wife, Lia, delivered to the Vatican on February 28.

The sleek black Explorer SUV was fitted with a custom hybrid transmission, as well as an antenna that is compatible with the European broadcast radio system, Ford said in a press release. The vehicle also features plenty of tributes to the Pope’s American roots - including Chicago flags on seat tags and the Windy City’s skyline etched into the center console.

The Chicago skyline engravings in the scruff plates, and Chicago flag seat tags are a very nice touch. I love feel good stories like this.

In this unconfirmed result, the M5 Max with an 18-core CPU achieved a score of 29,233 for multi-core CPU performance, which tops the 27,726 score achieved by the Mac Studio’s M3 Ultra chip with a 32-core CPU. M5 Max is now the fastest Apple silicon chip ever, and it even topped every other consumer PC processor in the Geekbench database.

In terms of multi-core CPU performance, the M5 Max is up to 5% faster than the M3 Ultra, and up to 15% faster than the M4 Max chip with a 16-core CPU.

The M3 Ultra chip was announced exactly one year ago, today. The M5 being 5% faster than a year old CPU that has nearly twice as many cores is freaking wild. The next Mac Studio update is going to be a beast. 💻🔥

There were initial impressions going around earlier today knocking the fact that one of the USB-C ports is only rated to USB 2.0 speeds. Sure, that feels very ‘90s, but for the customer base this machine will attract I guarantee you next to nobody will ever notice. It will be referred to as “the charging port” because they will never use it for any other purpose. According to an Apple spokesperson it was an inherent limitation to using an A-series chip that was originally designed for devices that only have a single USB-C port, the bus can’t handle more.

Yesterday I spoke about how impressed I was with recycled materials being a major focus of the Studio Displays, and now today I am even more impressed with the Neo. From the press release:

It features 60 percent recycled content — the highest percentage of any Apple product. This includes 90 percent recycled aluminum overall and 100 percent recycled cobalt in the battery. The enclosure is manufactured with a material-efficient forming process that uses 50 percent less aluminum compared to traditional machining methods.

There being no RAM upgrade beyond the stock 8GBs is disappointing, but not surprising necessarily. I think within a year or two a newer A-series chip will be added, and that will result in a RAM bump to 12GBs like we’ve seen with recent iPhone releases. What I do not understand whatsoever is Touch ID being a $100 upgrade from the base model (that also bumps storage to 512GBs). For a company that touts security every chance they get it is an odd choice, especially since they sell the iPad for $349 with Touch ID included.

Both are made with recycled content, including 100 percent recycled aluminum in the stand and 80 percent recycled glass in the standard glass option. Studio Display and Studio Display XDR are designed to be durable, repairable, and also offer industry-leading software support, while meeting Apple’s high standards for energy efficiency and safe chemistry. The paper packaging is 100 percent fiber-based and was designed to collapse so it can be easily recycled.

The majority of the display being recycled glass is a first in an Apple product, and it’s fantastic to see such a large panel given this treatment (even though it will obviously have much lower unit sales compared to more popular, small-screened devices). The 100 percent fiber-based packing being made collapsible so it easily fits in the bin is also a nice touch. The attention to these very small details is how the company will likely reach their goal of being carbon neutral across its entire footprint by 2030.

After spending 2025 through January 2026 building their largest leveraged positions in history, bets on digital assets have unraveled with unnerving speed.

In January 2026, US margin debt had surged to a record $1.28 trillion – its ninth consecutive monthly increase and a 50% rise from April 2025. That financial leverage added bids to crypto assets which made new all-time highs in May, July, August, and October 2025.

Then, despite investors continuing to pile on more margin debt than ever, prices collapsed 47% and shed $2 trillion in combined market capitalization as a sector rotation to AI and precious metals ensued.

Crypto losses since October are staggering.

US margin debt increased $53 billion from December to January alone. Worse, the ratio of margin to real disposable personal income exceeded 6.0% in January for the first time on record.

That ratio measures more financial leverage in January 2026 relative to income than the dot-com mania.

While it really reached a tipping point in 2025, the futures margin bros have been building up to where we are now since 2022. This is a perfect example to underscore the need for regulation in this wild west market.

The quantum-resistant cryptographic data needed to transparently publish TLS certificates is roughly 40 times bigger than the classical cryptographic material used today. A typical X.509 certificate chain used today comprises six elliptic curve signatures and two EC public keys, each of them only 64 bytes. This material can be cracked through the quantum-enabled Shor’s algorithm. The full chain is roughly 4 kilobytes. All this data must be transmitted when a browser connects to a site.

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To bypass the bottleneck, companies are turning to Merkle Trees, a data structure that uses cryptographic hashes and other math to verify the contents of large amounts of information using a small fraction of material used in more traditional verification processes in public key infrastructure. Cloudflare has a much deeper dive into Merkle Trees here.

Merkle Tree Certificates, “replace the heavy, serialized chain of signatures found in traditional PKI with compact Merkle Tree proofs,” members of Google’s Chrome Secure Web and Networking Team wrote Friday. “In this model, a Certification Authority (CA) signs a single ‘Tree Head’ representing potentially millions of certificates, and the ‘certificate’ sent to the browser is merely a lightweight proof of inclusion in that tree.”

I had a feeling either Google or Cloudflare (if not a university student) would be the first to resolve this pending security nightmare.

Jony Ive and Marc Newson of LoveFrom joined forces with Ferrari’s Flavio Manzoni to reveal the instrumentation and interior elements of the marque’s first EV, the Ferrari Luce.

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The Ferrari Luce has to do many things, forging a new technological identity for the brand, as well as a new path through largely uncharted but undeniably treacherous territory. You see, the electrification of luxury and performance hasn’t gone quite as well as the auto industry wanted it to. Even though EVs bring bushels of performance, innovative design and levels of luxury and craft that equals traditional platforms, the world’s superrich haven’t exactly fallen over themselves to buy into the zero-emission era.

Ferrari’s statement on the matter is therefore eagerly awaited. The decision to hand design over to Ive and Newson and their team at LoveFrom is therefore simultaneously bold and prudent. Bold, because few brands have the self-confidence and the financial wherewithal to support such a complex project, and prudent, because by hiving off the Ferrari EV to an outside consultancy – however esteemed – there’s always scope to walk it back should the venture not live up to expectations.

In a world where every automaker seems to be removing hardware controls and replacing them with only a slab of glass, this tactile interior design is incredible to see. It definitely leaves me wondering even moreso how the now defunct Apple Car project would have ended up looking.

Exciting new intelligent features and premium content build on familiar experiences of Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Pixelmator Pro, Keynote, Pages, Numbers, and later Freeform to make Apple Creator Studio an exciting subscription suite to empower creators of all disciplines while protecting their privacy.

With pricing set at $12.99/month or $129/year it would take roughly five years to exceed the one-time upfront combined cost of Final Cut and Logic. On Mac you do still have the option of avoiding the subscription by paying for Final Cut, Logic, and Pixelmator Pro upfront. My hope is that this additional subscription model signals a stronger commitment to the pace of updates, and therefore making it harder to argue against the change.

A year after Pixelmator Pro was acquired by Apple we know a bit more about the company’s plans for the app (which I am shocked they didn’t rename). Seeing it come to iPad has me very excited, but I am also confused why the one-time purchase option isn’t available. I already own the Mac version so it will just show up on my iPad Pro, but what about creators who bought into the marketing of the iPad being the computer of the future? For those people who don’t own a Mac the subscription is their only choice.

The icons are disappointing, and having two icon versions depending on whether you buy them with one-time purchase vs subscription is confusing. For better or worse they do fit in more naturally with the 26 era Liquid Glass design language.

Why are Pages, Keynote, and Numbers, the apps that makeup the iWork suite, being moved to a freemium model and included in this bundle? Why is there no iWork only subscription option for productivity customers who are not using creative pro apps like Logic? That is hands down the single most confusing aspect of this whole announcement.

The developer of ICEBlock, an iPhone app that anonymously tracks the presence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, has sued the Trump administration for free speech violations after Apple removed the service from its app store under demands from the White House.

The suit, filed on Monday in federal court in Washington, asks a judge to declare that the administration violated the First Amendment when it threatened to criminally prosecute the app’s developer and pressured Apple to make the app unavailable for download, which the tech company did in October.

Keep in mind that Google isn’t mentioned for this particular app because it was never made available cross-platform, but other apps were on Android and also faced the same takedown pressure from the Fed. I will definitely be watching this space expecting to see more app developers file suit.

Hosted by acclaimed historians Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook, The Rest Is History has become a fixture at the top of the charts worldwide by bringing history’s biggest moments to life. From the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, to the sinking of the Titanic, the hosts blend deep expertise with gripping storytelling and unexpected humor to make complex subjects accessible and compelling for millions of listeners.

I wholeheartedly agree with The Rest of History being given the award for show of the year. Tom and Dom have great chemistry, and they’re both so knowledgeable about seemingly every topic they cover. This is one of the few podcasts where I can claim having listened to the entire back catalog of episodes after first trying it out two years ago. If you haven’t yet I strongly recommend giving it a listen.

Today we’re establishing a new creative studio in Reality Labs led by Alan Dye, who has spent nearly 20 years leading design at Apple.

The new studio will bring together design, fashion, and technology to define the next generation of our products and experiences. Our idea is to treat intelligence as a new design material and imagine what becomes possible when it is abundant, capable, and human-centered. We plan to elevate design within Meta, and pull together a talented group with a combination of craft, creative vision, systems thinking, and deep experience building iconic products that bridge hardware and software.

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We’re entering a new era where AI glasses and other devices will change how we connect with technology and each other. The potential is enormous, but what matters most is making these experiences feel natural and truly centered around people. With this new studio, we’re focused on making every interaction thoughtful, intuitive, and built to serve people.

I find this framing to be fascinating. Not because I believe in Dye or Meta to truly deliver something worth using, but because Zuckerberg thinks smart glasses with a heads-up display and the metaverse will have a chance in hell at replacing the smartphone in the near future. Grab as many seasoned designers as you want, but when you lack the ecosystem that enables established hardware and software companies to truly thrive, you will be left with nothing more than a cool demo. As an extension of the smartphone an accessory pair of smart glasses will certainly find a market, and that is why Apple, Google, and Samsung are the only companies in a position to truly innovate in this area.

India’s government has backtracked on an order for all smartphones to be pre-installed with a state-owned security app after a mass outcry over privacy concerns and refusal by technology companies to comply.

The department of telecommunications confirmed it had revoked its previous order for all technology companies to mandatorily install the government’s Sanchar Saathi cybersecurity app on to every smartphone in India within 90 days.

Political outcry erupted over the order and several tech companies, including Apple and Google, made it clear they would not comply due to privacy concerns. In a statement on Wednesday afternoon, the government confirmed it had “decided not to make the pre-installation mandatory for mobile manufacturers”.

It emphasised that the app, which allows users to block and track lost or stolen mobile phones and report fraudulent calls, was “secure and purely meant to help citizens” against “bad actors”.

The initial order, given quietly to tech companies last week, landed the government in hot water after internet privacy groups and the political opposition raised concerns that the app could be used as a mass surveillance tool.

Apple and Google anonymously briefed the media that tech companies would be pushing back against the order as the move raised privacy concerns for their operating systems and violated internal policies.

I was quite relieved to see both Apple and Google come out of the gate so strongly in their outright refusal to comply with this order. It gave opposing MPs in the Indian parliament plenty of ammunition to push back on what is clearly a blatant invasion of privacy. The most laughable part of the whole ordeal is to think that anyone would believe the intention behind the app was anything but mass surveillance.

Starbucks will pay about $35 million to more than 15,000 workers in what officials are calling the largest worker protection settlement in New York City history — after the company allegedly denied thousands of workers stable schedules and cut their hours arbitrarily.

The agreement, announced Monday, could mean thousands of dollars for many Starbucks employees, with checks coming in the mail this winter. It calls for most hourly workers employed by the company in New York City from July 2021 through early July 2024 to get $50 for each week worked. An employee who worked for a year and a half during that period would get $3,900, according to a city announcement.

Apple today announced John Giannandrea, Apple’s senior vice president for Machine Learning and AI Strategy, is stepping down from his position and will serve as an advisor to the company before retiring in the spring of 2026. Apple also announced that renowned AI researcher Amar Subramanya has joined Apple as vice president of AI, reporting to Craig Federighi. Subramanya will be leading critical areas, including Apple Foundation Models, ML research, and AI Safety and Evaluation. The balance of Giannandrea’s organization will shift to Sabih Khan and Eddy Cue to align closer with similar organizations.

The company can refer to it as retirement if they want, but we all know damn well the writing was on the wall after Apple promised Apple Intelligence app intents support for Siri at WWDC 2024 and Giannandrea failed to deliver in spectacular fashion. It is slated for release in Spring of 2026, but until then it remains vaporware. I find the shift to Eddy Cue partially overseeing future development to be the most fascinating aspect of this announcement.

Eight hundred and eleven pounds of potatoes, 402 challahs, 68 chefs, 59 people named David and 27 people named Rachel. It all adds up to the world’s largest Shabbat dinner, which was organized by Temple Emanuel’s Streicker Center and held at the Javits Center on Friday night.

Some 2,800 Jewish New Yorkers packed the top floor of Javits North on 11th Avenue to participate in The Big Shabbat — an official attempt to host the largest Shabbat dinner in history, as verified by the Guinness Book of World Records.

This is absolutely incredible, and I wish I had known about it in advance.

People close to Apple say the long-planned transition is not related to the company’s current performance, ahead of what is expected to be a blockbuster end-of-year sales period for the iPhone.

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The company is unlikely to name a new CEO before its next earnings report in late January, which covers the critical holiday period.”

The fact that multiple sources close to Apple have provided this information to FT of all outlets screams intentional leaking from the board of directors. John Ternus, currently SVP of Hardware, being the rumored CEO replacement makes total sense. He will be celebrating 25 years at Apple next year, and the company deserves a hardware guy at the helm once more.

iPhone Pocket features a ribbed open structure with the qualities of the original pleats by ISSEY MIYAKE. Born from the idea of creating an additional pocket, its understated design fully encloses iPhone, expanding to fit more of a user’s everyday items. When stretched, the open textile subtly reveals its contents and allows users to peek at their iPhone display. iPhone Pocket can be worn in a variety of ways — handheld, tied onto bags, or worn directly on the body. Featuring a playful color palette, the short strap design is available in eight colors, and the long strap design in three colors.

Aside from the $149/$229 starting price, the company has finally introduced a true successor to iPod Socks. Quite fitting that the only Apple retail store in New York City that will carry the product is the SoHo location on posh Prince Street.

Fun fact: the same designer of iPhone Pocket also made Steve Jobs’ famous black turtleneck.

With the Swift SDK for Android, you can now start porting your Swift packages to Android. Over 25% of packages in the Swift Package Index already build for Android, and the Community Showcase now indicates Android compatibility.

The swift-java project enables you to interoperate between Java and Swift. It is both a library and a code generator, enabling you to integrate Swift and Java in both directions by automatically generating safe and performant bindings. To learn about generating bindings to bring your business logic to Android, check out the recent Swift Server Side meetup talk by Mads Odgaard.

This is a big deal, and one I know a lot of people have been waiting impatiently for. It took longer than expected, but is starting off with a really solid foundation.

Comic Sans is the font that refuses to die. It’s been dragged, mocked, and meme-ified since the moment it became a household name. It’s been labeled childish, lazy, and unprofessional. Designers love to hate it. And yet, here we are, decades later, still talking about it. Comic Sans is still showing up in emails, on signs, in classrooms, and in protest posters. It’s survived countless waves of design trends and the court of public opinion. In a world obsessed with perfection, Comic Sans seems untouchable. Why? Because it’s fun. Because it’s flawed. Because it’s human.

This is a wonderful examination of the history of this font. It was born into a world of rigid fonts, offering a warmth and personable experience to a generation of people who were all new to computers.

This design presents a young Steve Jobs sitting in front of a quintessentially northern California landscape of oak-covered rolling hills. His posture and expression, as he is captured in a moment of reflection, show how this environment inspired his vision to transform complex technology into something as intuitive and organic as nature itself. Inscriptions are “UNITED STATES OF AMERICA” and “CALIFORNIA.” Additional inscriptions are “STEVE JOBS” and “MAKE SOMETHING WONDERFUL.”

It seems that each state gives a recommendation for a commemorative coin, and that Gavin Newsom submitted Steve Jobs. Fitting for it to be a $1 coin, as that was Steve Jobs’ annual salary draw at Apple (on top of millions in stock lol).

Apple TV will deliver comprehensive coverage of Formula 1, with all practice, qualifying, Sprint sessions, and Grands Prix available to Apple TV subscribers. Select races and all practice sessions will also be available for free in the Apple TV app throughout the course of the season. In addition to broadcasting Formula 1 on Apple TV, Apple will amplify the sport across Apple News, Apple Maps, Apple Music, and Apple Fitness+. Apple Sports — the free app for iPhone — will feature live updates for every qualifying, Sprint, and race for each Grand Prix across the season, with real-time leaderboards, season driver and constructor standings, Live Activities to follow on the Lock Screen, and a designated widget for the iPhone Home Screen.

Starting in 2026, all F1 races will stream exclusively on Apple TV in the United States for the next five years. What makes this interesting is how Apple plans to weave Formula 1 into basically everything they do. I’ve never been a consumer of these races, but with easy access in a subscription I already pay for I might finally give it a go.

Apple TV+ is now simply Apple TV, with a vibrant new identity. Ahead of its global streaming debut on Apple TV, the film continues to be available for purchase on participating digital platforms, including the Apple TV app, Amazon Prime Video, Fandango at Home and more.

Would love to know how dropping the plus sign is considered a “vibrant new identity”. 😅

Update: I now have my answer.

Since we launched the public Apple Security Bounty program in 2020, we’re proud to have awarded over $35 million to more than 800 security researchers, with multiple individual reports earning $500,000 rewards. We’re grateful to everyone who submitted their research and worked closely with us to help protect our users.

Today we’re announcing the next major chapter for Apple Security Bounty, featuring the industry’s highest rewards, expanded research categories, and a flag system for researchers to objectively demonstrate vulnerabilities and obtain accelerated awards.

1. We’re doubling our top award to $2 million for exploit chains that can achieve similar goals as sophisticated mercenary spyware attacks. This is an unprecedented amount in the industry and the largest payout offered by any bounty program we’re aware of — and our bonus system, providing additional rewards for Lockdown Mode bypasses and vulnerabilities discovered in beta software, can more than double this reward, with a maximum payout in excess of $5 million. We’re also doubling or significantly increasing rewards in many other categories to encourage more intensive research. This includes $100,000 for a complete Gatekeeper bypass, and $1 million for broad unauthorized iCloud access, as no successful exploit has been demonstrated to date in either category.

2. Our bounty categories are expanding to cover even more attack surfaces. Notably, we’re rewarding one-click WebKit sandbox escapes with up to $300,000, and wireless proximity exploits over any radio with up to $1 million.

3. We’re introducing Target Flags, a new way for researchers to objectively demonstrate exploitability for some of our top bounty categories, including remote code execution and Transparency, Consent, and Control (TCC) bypasses — and to help determine eligibility for a specific award. Researchers who submit reports with Target Flags will qualify for accelerated awards, which are processed immediately after the research is received and verified, even before a fix becomes available.

There are several very smart refinements being made here. On the payment increases, unfortunately so many nation states want access to these exploits that Apple has to really make a good offer in order to keep people honest.

The former team from rubygems.org is excited to announce a new gem server for the Ruby community:

https://gem.coop

Right now, the current versions of RubyGems and Bundler work with this new server. All Ruby developers are welcome to switch to using this new server immediately. Just swap your primary source to https://gem.coop

The gem.coop server is simple and we aim to keep it that way. We plan to add features that serve to increase security and make packaging blazing fast. We want the default choice to be the secure choice.

When faced with a need to change things, the Ruby community does just that. More of this please.

Taylor Swift‘s “The Life of a Showgirl” now officially has a claim to the biggest first-week numbers ever recorded for an album. Billboard reported Wednesday that, in its first five days out, the album has surpassed 3.5 million equivalent album units, representing consumption across both sales and streaming.

That breaks the record previously held by Adele‘s “25,” which bowed with 3.482 million units in December 2015 chart, a high-water mark that has stood for just two months shy of a decade.

Swift broke the record in five days, meaning her tally will rise further still in the two days remaining in the chart week.

Certainly one hell of an accomplishment. I was one of those sales, and think the album as a whole is one of her absolute best to date.

Apple has removed ICEBlock, an app that allowed users to monitor and report the location of immigration enforcement officers, from the App Store.

“We created the App Store to be a safe and trusted place to discover apps,” Apple said in a statement to Business Insider. “Based on information we’ve received from law enforcement about the safety risks associated with ICEBlock, we have removed it and similar apps from the App Store.”

Obviously the reasoning is a load of crap, but if Apple wants to operate in a given country they have to follow local laws and respond to government requests. This is far from being an unique situation.

This September marks three decades since PlayStation launched in North America and Europe, followed by additional regions. The global launch changed the landscape of popular culture forever. In celebration of this milestone, we’re excited to announce PlayStation: The First 30 Years, a new large-format photography book.

Players will get a glimpse into never-before-seen prototypes, concept sketches, and design models that shaped hardware development at Sony Interactive Entertainment. From daring early designs to the iconic consoles and controllers that defined gaming culture for millions, PlayStation: The First 30 Years is a 400 page visual journey through PlayStation history that gives fans a rare glimpse into the brand’s evolution through the generations.

Some of the controller designs shared in the blog post are truly wild concepts. They are also collaborating with Reebok on a sneaker to commemorate the anniversary…that I might have to buy.

For the past couple of weeks, a community of developers who use the programming language Ruby have been closely following a dramatic change in ownership of some of the most essential tools in its ecosystem with far reaching impacts for the worldwide web.

If you’re not familiar with Ruby or the open source development community, you probably haven’t heard about any of this, but the tools in question serve as critical infrastructure for gigantic internet services like GitHub, Shopify, and others, so any disruption to them would be catastrophic to those companies, their users, and vast swaths of the internet.

This is a very detailed analysis of the drama from the last several weeks, and definitely worth reading.

I believed that giving users such a simple way to navigate the internet would unlock creativity and collaboration on a global scale. If you could put anything on it, then after a while, it would have everything on it.

But for the web to have everything on it, everyone had to be able to use it, and want to do so. This was already asking a lot. I couldn’t also ask that they pay for each search or upload they made. In order to succeed, therefore, it would have to be free. That’s why, in 1993, I convinced my Cern managers to donate the intellectual property of the world wide web, putting it into the public domain. We gave the web away to everyone.

Today, I look at my invention and I am forced to ask: is the web still free today? No, not all of it. We see a handful of large platforms harvesting users’ private data to share with commercial brokers or even repressive governments. We see ubiquitous algorithms that are addictive by design and damaging to our teenagers’ mental health. Trading personal data for use certainly does not fit with my vision for a free web.

On many platforms, we are no longer the customers, but instead have become the product. Our data, even if anonymised, is sold on to actors we never intended it to reach, who can then target us with content and advertising. This includes deliberately harmful content that leads to real-world violence, spreads misinformation, wreaks havoc on our psychological wellbeing and seeks to undermine social cohesion.

No notes, as the kids say. 🌐

A final vote on the project was expected during Monday’s City-County Council meeting, but Councilor Michael-Paul Hart, a key player in the fight over the center, surprised dozens of residents in the overflow room when he said the tech giant planned to withdraw.

Minutes later, Joseph Calderon, the local attorney for Google’s rezoning request, confirmed the news, and hundreds of cheers erupted in the packed council chambers.

The abrupt end to the controversial tech development comes after months of debate between supporters and residents who feared their quality of life in Franklin Township would suffer.

I’ve been following this story all summer, and could not be happier to see this outcome. Data centers hire very few people relative to their environmental impact, and people in the community rightfully called that fact out. Google would have also been using a ton of a water in an area filled with food crops that is already experiencing a severe drought.

The blog post that our colleague shared in July, titled “The law of the land,” by 37signals co-founder, co-owner, and CTO, David Heinemeier Hansson, celebrates the US Supreme Court’s ruling ending considerations of race in admission to colleges and universities. In that post, Hansson links to another that drew our attention, “The waning days of DEI’s dominance.” We also read a third post of his, “Meta goes no politics at work (and nobody cares).” We found there a thread of ugly thought, couched in an overriding intellectual dishonesty, that re-escalated our discussion about continued use of Basecamp.

It was the language he used in “waning days” from November 2022 that really put DHH back on my radar. Will does an excellent job of explaining why it is so problematic:

In the “waning days” piece, Hansson depicts Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion as a movement that became entrenched in 2020, a process he characterizes being “accelerated” by a number of factors, including “the riots in the wake of George Floyd.” Referring to the protests that followed the murder of George Floyd as “riots” is an offhand gesture as Hansson uses it, but it gets our attention because we know how false, ideological, and ugly it is.

Research and the documentary record show that the protests of 2020 were overwhelmingly peaceful, that incidents of violence were limited and often instigated by counter protestors or provocateurs, and that in many cases the responses of the police and federal authorities provoked and exacerbated the violence. The characterization of these events as “riots” followed as part of a deliberate disinformation campaign by right-wing groups, media’s distorting focus on isolated incidents, and biased framing by political campaigns. It plays on a longstanding and shameful tendency in the US of depicting any protest or demands for justice from Black members of our society as innately violent and threatening.

In the same post, Hansson takes glee in the mass layoffs of tech workers in late 2022. He imagines that they were the group “from whom the DEI movement drew its most active and engaged disciples,” and seems to be delighted that “hundreds of thousands” of tech workers will be out of work – “perhaps for quite a while!” – and therefore “the most fervent ideologues among them” will be unable to find work. The implication is unavoidable, that he and perhaps other tech bosses might blacklist workers who have records of advocating for more diverse and inclusive workplaces.

The rest of the blog post is a digression on the legacies of systems of oppression, and considering the harm they’ve caused. I took a lot away from it, and strongly recommend giving it a read.

Precisely engineered and crafted by Balmuda’s team in Tokyo, the design originated from Ive’s quest for a lantern for his sailboat. ‘I have been sailing since I was a little boy, and when you are on the water, your connection to nature and the elements is so clear. I think there’s something about using a lantern in these extreme conditions,’ he told Wallpaper*. ‘I was surprised that I couldn’t find something that could survive in extreme maritime conditions.’

His design is quietly familiar, with a silhouette recalling vintage Fresnel lamps – although Ive was careful to create a design that wasn’t nostalgic. ‘The reason this feels familiar isn’t because we took elements that previously existed. The reason it is familiar is humanity and ingenuity.’

Ive’s language is a bit nauseating at this point, but I suppose he’s earned it.

The attention to detail as described here harkens back to so many finely-tuned Apple products:

Terao’s team had already worked on a portable lantern, which became the starting point for the collaboration’s lighting element. And the light given by the ‘Sailing Lantern’ is both precise and poetic: as the dimming dial is turned on, the low light starts with a pink-red glow, quietly growing in intensity until it reaches its full illumination with a white-blue tint. This, Terao explains, is the same effect of the previous lantern he produced, achieved thanks to a series of red and white LEDs that can be controlled as the light is dimmed, to create an effect that is as close to natural light, or fire, as an industrially produced light can be.

‘It’s the same that you find with flames: lower flames are red, and as they become hotter, they turn blue. They are the colours of nature,’ notes Terao. Switching off the lantern is a pleasure in itself, with the light going off slowly, almost imperceptibly.

This, Ive notes, is a consequence of his design process, driven by language as much as design. ‘I can only draw a small percentage of the characteristics of this object, but I can write about many more. You don’t switch off a candle or a bonfire. So when you use a word like extinguish, that to me is so open: the possibilities, the provocation. And I think when you switch this off, the feel of the mechanism and the sound and then the glow just gently goes. That’s what makes us happy.’

Configuration management has long been a challenge across different sources and environments. Previously, configuration in Swift had to be manually stitched together from environment variables, command-line arguments, JSON files, and external systems. Swift Configuration creates a common interface for configuration, enabling you to:

• Read configuration the same way across your codebase using a single configuration reader API that’s usable from both applications and libraries.

• Quickly get started with a few lines of code using built-in providers for environment variables, command-line arguments, JSON and YAML files, and in-memory values.

• Build and share custom configuration providers using a public ConfigProvider protocol that anyone can implement and share.

This is a fantastic addition, and especially for Swift on Server.

Apple explains how the Digital Markets Act is forcing the company to make some concerning changes to how it designs and delivers Apple products to its users in Europe.

This covers a lot of salient points, but several have already been met with skepticism and disregard by the European Commission. This is what happens when a governing body knows absolutely nothing about software development cycles.

The latest iOS beta code includes an unreleased feature called Notification Forwarding. As the name suggests, it will let users choose to show notifications from their iPhone on another non-Apple device or accessory. Once available, the feature can be enabled in Settings.

One of the strings found in the code suggests that notifications can only be forwarded to “one accessory at a time,” and that enabling this option disables notifications on the Apple Watch.

In addition, iOS 26.1 beta 1 also includes references to some new frameworks related to accessory pairing, including one called “AccessoryExtension.” The new frameworks seem unfinished, but they hint at a new, easier method for pairing third-party devices with an iPhone.

This is most certainly in response to the European Commission’s request last December. Of all the concessions Apple must make in order to satisfy the DMA this one makes the most sense in terms of benefiting consumers.

I consider Ruby Central’s behavior a threat to the Ruby community as a whole.

The forceful removal of those who maintained RubyGems and Bundler for over a decade is inherently a hostile action. Ruby Central crossed a line by doing this.

When called out, these changes were mostly reverted. Then, it was done again.

By crossing that line a second time after being called out for it, Ruby Central has made it extremely clear to me that they are not engaging in good faith.

Ruby Central’s behavior has forced my hand. I refuse to watch this without speaking up.

I am resigning from my position at Ruby Central, effective immediately.

To remove any doubt: Ruby Central unilaterally, with no explanation, revoked all access to RubyGems against both my wishes and the wishes of the entire RubyGems team.

In this update, we’re excited to introduce two powerful enhancements that bring more flexibility to your creative workflow. First, we’re introducing project files, you can now save your creation as an editable Paint project file and seamlessly pick up where you left off. Once you’re ready to save your artwork, go to the File menu and select Save as project. The File Explorer will open, allowing you to choose a location and save your work as a .paint file. When you’re ready to return, simply open the file to launch it in Paint, right where you left off.

We’re also adding an opacity slider, giving you control over the transparency of your strokes with the Pencil and Brush tools. To get started, select either tool and use the slider on the left side of the canvas to adjust the opacity to your desired level. Try experimenting with both the size and opacity sliders to create smooth blends and layered effects that bring your artwork to life.

Better late than never I suppose.

Jerry Greenfield, one of two founders of the iconic progressive ice cream brand Ben & Jerry’s, has stepped down citing political pressure from the brand’s parent company, Unilever.

The Ben & Jerry’s brand has clashed with Unilever over Israel in recent years, and Greenfield’s co-founder Ben Cohen has been a vocal critic of Israel’s war in Gaza. But Greenfield’s resignation letter, which Cohen posted to social media, does not mention Israel issues at all. Instead, it cites domestic political issues on which Greenfield said Ben & Jerry’s had been “silenced.”

In the letter, Greenfield writes that a guarantee of political independence was the bedrock of his agreement to sell to Unilever two decades ago.

“It’s profoundly disappointing to come to the conclusion that that independence … is gone,” he wrote. “And it’s happening at a time when our country’s current administration is attacking civil rights, voting rights, the rights of immigrants, women, and the LGBTQ community.”

He said he felt he had no choice but to step aside. “Standing up for the values of justice, equity, and our shared humanity has never been more important, and yet Ben & Jerry’s has been silenced, sidelined for fear of upsetting those in power,” Greenfield wrote. He later added, “If I can’t carry those values forward inside the company today, then I will carry them forward outside, with all the love and conviction I can.”

The MTA set a new post-pandemic subway ridership record with a seven-day high of 26.8 million riders between Monday, Sept. 8 and Sunday, Sept. 14, according to Gov. Kathy Hochul.

…

Delving into the stats, the agency’s NYC Transit recorded 4.1 million riders on the subway on Monday; 4.44 million on Tuesday; 4.48 million on Wednesday; 4.51 million on Thursday; and 4.2 million riders on Friday.

I felt like the subway system had been busier lately, and very happy to see rider stats moving in the right direction.

The Safari web extension packager enables you to package and distribute your Safari extensions using App Store Connect from any web browser, without requiring a Mac or access to Xcode. After packaging your extension, you can use TestFlight to test your extension or submit it to the App Store for distribution.

One of my favourite features added to web browsers in the last few years is text fragments.

Text fragments allow you to link directly to specific text on a web page, and some browsers will highlight the linked text – for example, by scrolling to it, or adding a coloured highlight. This is useful if I’m linking to a long page that doesn’t have linkable headings – I want it to be easy for readers to find the part of the page I was looking for.

…

To help me out, I’ve written a small bookmarklet to generate these URLs

I totally agree that text fragments are a wonderfully helpful addition to link sharing. Alex created a bookmarklet to generate correctly formatted URLs, but if you’re a macOS/iOS user you don’t need to take this additional step. Apple added support for the feature last year, which they call link highlighting, and it’s in the context menu behind a long press/secondary click once you’ve selected text.

Since the initial complaint, Microsoft has unbundled Teams from Office 365 in the EU, but critics said the changes were too narrow.

In May, the $3.7 trillion software giant promised concessions, such as continuing the Teams and Office separation for seven years.

After a market test, Microsoft has since made additional commitments, such as publishing more information on so-called “interoperability” or the ability to use its products with others made by rivals.

These new pledges have satisfied the EU’s regulator, which said on Friday that it helped to restore fair competition and open the market to other providers.

I doubt this will be as effective overall as the EU hopes it will be, but preventing market concentration is important. The biggest win for consumers in all of this is the ability to pay less for the other Microsoft services in a bundle that excludes Teams.

Today’s photo log is the first time I’ve left the house with the Vita for the express purpose of using it to take photos. I knew that the Vita had a crappy pair of camera but I didn’t realise it shot in 640x480. I managed to get a couple of decent photos out of it, I think?

We have seen this sort of throwback styling with the Game Boy camera, but in recent memory this is the first time the PS Vita has been used to capture retro photographs.

Artificial intelligence systems shouldn’t be taking sides on political issues. People should be able to have conversations with AI about difficult subjects and get thoughtful, balanced responses rather than responses that reflect one particular worldview. When we program AI to treat certain political perspectives as obviously correct while dismissing others as harmful, we’re making choices about whose voices get amplified and whose get marginalized.

Labeling DEI as a controversial topic rather than categorizing related concepts as inherently harmful actually reflects reality more accurately. These are genuinely contested issues where reasonable people disagree, and AI systems should acknowledge that complexity rather than presuming one side has all the answers. The bigger picture here is that we need AI that can navigate difficult topics without predetermined conclusions. That approach will serve everyone better in the long run, regardless of where they stand politically.

With iOS 26, Apple has announced a dramatically new look to their UI: Liquid Glass. Solid material icon elements give way to softer, shinier, glassier icons. I’ve already been chronicling the evolution of macOS icons, and now I’m expanding that project to include iOS. This collection will continue to grow and evolve with new additions throughout the autumn. Enjoy!

I am glad iOS will accompany his macOS project that was announced a few days ago. I would love to see a print book offered as well.

iOS 26 and its Safari will introduce exciting new features for web designers. Most importantly a completely new design language for the frame around on top of the websites we build. I’ve been using the beta for a few months now and collected some advice for designing and developing websites for the delightful and elegant new design language, Liquid Glass™.

This is a great write-up of the accessibility pitfalls Apple’s new design introduces. Though I will admit it took reading a few examples for me to catch on to the sarcasm. 😅

With macOS 26, Apple has announced a dramatically new look to their UI: Liquid Glass. Solid material icon elements give way to softer, shinier, glassier icons. The rounded rectangle became slightly more rounded, and Apple eliminated the ability for icon elements to extend beyond the icon rectangle (as seen in the current icons for GarageBand, Photo Booth, Dictionary, etc.).

With this release being one of the most dramatic visual overhauls of macOS’s design, I wanted to begin a collection chronicling the evolution of the system icons over the years. I’ve been rolling these out on social media over the past week and will continue to add to and update this collection slowly over the summer. Enjoy!

I love seeing historical preservation projects like this.

The other big improvement is bi-directional tone mapping, which lets content creators take advantage of how much brighter and more colorful modern TVs have gotten. Instead of just cramming HDR content onto whatever display you have, this actually lets filmmakers optimize their work for high-end displays while still looking good on regular TVs. They’re also introducing “Authentic Motion” for better motion handling and specific optimizations for sports and gaming. Hisense is the first company jumping on board with actual TVs, and CANAL+ will be creating content for it. It sounds like they’re finally addressing the gap between what HDR was supposed to do and how it actually works in your living room.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Coincidentally, new Apple TV hardware is rumored to be coming soon, and I’m guessing we’ll see Apple tout this as a key new feature to steer upgrades.

To bolster its “Advanced Technology Augmentations to Military Information Support Operations” — also known as MISO — SOCOM is looking for a contractor that can “Provide a capability leveraging agentic Al or multi‐LLM agent systems with specialized roles to increase the scale of influence operations.”

So-called “agentic” systems use machine-learning models purported to operate with minimal human instruction or oversight. These systems can be used in conjunction with large language models, or LLMs, like ChatGPT, which generate text based on user prompts. While much marketing hype orbits around these agentic systems and LLMs for their potential to execute mundane tasks like online shopping and booking tickets, SOCOM believes the techniques could be well suited for running an autonomous propaganda outfit.

This is not at all surprising and very likely already being employed by other nation states, and probably other areas of our own government too. It’s a pretty predictable move, considering how quickly generative LLMs are evolving and the ongoing need for countries to gain an advantage in the information space. It’s safe to assume this is just the tip of the iceberg, and we’ll see more reporting on this kind of thing in the near future.

When I click on a blog post these days, I’m not usually looking for the definitive encyclopedia entry or the slickest marketing brochure. Honestly? I’m hoping for something far simpler, yet increasingly rare. The sound of another human being figuring something out. I value both tutorials and personal experiences, but it seems like the latter is disappearing.

I want their experience. The messy, subjective, sometimes frustrating, often illuminating reality of them wrestling with a tool, an idea, a problem, or a passion. Tell me what it felt like. What surprised you? What pissed you off? What little trick saved your sanity? What opinion did you form that might be totally wrong, but is authentically yours? Give me the hot takes, the war stories, the “here’s why this mattered to me” anecdotes. Facts have their place, but it’s the human filter that makes them stick, that makes them mean something.

That’s very well said, and it echoes the sentiment in the piece I wrote earlier this month, ‘Why I keep writing in the AI era’:

People connect with other people in ways that AI can’t quite replicate. We want to know not just what the solution is, but how someone else approached the problem, what they tried that didn’t work, and what they learned along the way. There’s context and personality in human writing that gets lost when everything gets distilled down to the most efficient answer.

Today the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled against President Trump’s massive “Liberation Day” tariffs in VOS Selections v. Trump, a case filed by Liberty Justice Center and myself on behalf of five small US businesses (we have since been joined by prominent Supreme Court litigators Michael McConnell and Neal Katyal; Neal skillfully conducted the oral argument before the Federal Circuit). The ruling also covers the case filed by twelve states led by Oregon; they prevailed, as well. On these points, a 7-4 majority of the en banc Federal Circuit affirmed the earlier trial court decision issued by the Court of International Trade. The court also remanded the issue of how broad the injunction against the tariffs should be to the Court of International Trade. That litigation is, however, postponed until October 14, to give the government a chance to ask the Supreme Court to review the case.

The majority concluded that the tariffs in question are not authorized by the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 (IEEPA), and that the major questions doctrine precludes interpreting IEEPA to give the president the virtually unlimited tariff authority he claims.

It is nice to see a small win here. Though the tariffs remain in place until October which gives Trump time to appeal and send it up to the lawless Supreme Court.

Claude in Xcode is now available in the Intelligence settings panel, allowing users to seamlessly add their existing paid Claude account to Xcode and start using Claude Sonnet 4. (155826755)

When using ChatGPT in Xcode, users can now start a new conversation with either GPT-4.1 or GPT-5, with GPT-5 set as the default. (158342780)

I’m not sure how useful developers will find the updated ChatGPT integration, but I believe Claude will be very popular among a specific sect.

Speaking directly with TorrentFreak, iTorrent developer Daniil Vinogradov (XITRIX) says that Apple did not reach out to him regarding the revocation of his alternative EU distribution rights.

Soon after the issues appeared, Vinogradov sent a support request to Apple seeking clarification, but that wasn’t helpful either. Instead, Apple responded with a generic message related to App Store issues.

After another follow-up last week, Apple informed the developer that their escalation team is looking into it, but nothing further. “I still have no idea if it was my fault or Apple’s, and their responses make no sense,” Vinogradov says.

The safe bet is that the developer did nothing wrong in this case. There have been too many instances of App Review pulling these same sorts of shenanigans in the past for it not to be the result of corporate politics.

Another thing I’ve recently implemented is a Low-Contrast Mode toggle at the top of every page

It was brought to my attention by 7700e6, which has pretty sensitive eyes so the high-contrast was causing quite a bit of eye strain, especially on higher levels of brightness

I was only reminded of this later by freeplay, but usually this would be implemented using the prefers-contrast media query, but turns out I don’t know a single browser or operating system that lets me set the contrast to less

I’ve seen lots of operating systems that give me a high contrast option, but never one that let me reduce contrast with it being recognized by applications

So, some more CSS magic to the rescue!

I’ve always ensured my website adheres to WCAG accessibility standards for high-contrast considerations. However, regarding eye strain and other sensitivities, I have never implemented a low-contrast option. This is a great CSS tip that I will now work on for a future update to my design.

Also, hats off to Alexia for practicing proper permalink structure.

Elon Musk is suing Apple and OpenAI over claims that their deal to build ChatGPT into the iPhone is stifling competition in the AI industry. In a lawsuit filed on Monday, the Musk-owned X Corp. and xAI also accuse Apple’s Apple Store of “deprioritizing” rival chatbots and “super” apps, including Grok and X.

Musk’s companies claim that iPhone users “have no reason” to download third-party AI apps because the company “force[s]” users to use ChatGPT as their default chatbot app when enabling Apple Intelligence. “Apple and OpenAI have locked up markets to maintain their monopolies and prevent innovators like X and xAI from competing,” the companies allege.

Elon Musk cannot help but continue to embarrass himself and draw negative attention. The lawsuit cites monopoly-like behavior rooted in integration and suppressed visibility. But there are public counterexamples: AI apps such as DeepSeek (which topped the App Store in January), Perplexity (ranked #1 in India in July), and even Musk’s own Grok briefly hit the top spot in February. These instances immediately complicate (if not outright debunk) claims that Apple’s system entirely forecloses AI competition.

Antitrust law doesn’t prohibit partnerships either. It simply requires demonstration of unfair exclusion, discrimination, or abusive conduct. Apple is already exploring other AI partnerships with Gemini and Claude which counters any accusation of exclusive behavior. Maybe if Grok wasn’t praising Hitler and parroting far-right conspiracy theories xAI would be part of those discussions too.

We believe effective child safety policies should be carefully tailored to address real harms, without creating huge obstacles for smaller providers and resulting in negative consequences for free expression. That’s why until legal challenges to this law are resolved, we’ve made the difficult decision to block access from Mississippi IP addresses. We know this is disappointing for our users in Mississippi, but we believe this is a necessary measure while the courts review the legal arguments.

All this will achieve is increasing revenue for VPN companies.

When Trump Mobile first unveiled the T1 Phone, we were confused by the mixed marketing, which included dubious renders of what at least appeared to be an original phone along with multiple appearances from what was quite clearly a gold-plated iPhone. Now we can add Samsung’s Galaxy S25 Ultra into the mix.

The Trump Mobile team shared an ad to X on Wednesday pushing preorders of the T1, but with an image we’d never seen before. You don’t have to look hard to realize that this is an S25 Ultra that’s been Photoshopped gold with a T1 logo and US flag; looking a little closer confirms that it’s a render of that phone in a Spigen case, right down to the Spigen logo they didn’t bother to remove.

It’s a remarkable choice because the S25 Ultra looks even less like the T1 Phone’s official renders than the iPhone the company has previously used in promotions. Even Spigen noticed the dupe, saying what we’re all thinking in its reply on X: “??? bro what”.

This just keeps getting better. When exactly do those “American hands behind every device” come into play?

The Trump administration’s 50 percent tariffs on imported steel and aluminum were expanded this week to cover hundreds of imports that plainly are not steel or aluminum. Among the items targeted by the new tariffs: dairy products like milk and cream, as well as gasoline and other fuels, fire extinguishers, baby strollers, furniture, engines, and motorcycles. In short, anything that contains steel or aluminum or that is (as with dairy products) transported or stored in steel or aluminum containers could now be subject to those massive import taxes.

Did someone order stupidity with a side of unilateral power? The details really drive home how unprecedented this is:

Officially, the Commerce Department says the 407 new product categories covered by the tariffs are “derivative” of steel and aluminum. Only the steel and aluminum components of the imports will actually be taxed.

In reality, however, this is a wild expansion of how tariffs typically apply.

“Many of these new [Harmonized Tariff Schedule] HTS provisions would not normally be considered aluminum or steel derivative products,” notes Michael Roll, a trade attorney for Deringer, an international logistics firm, “at least not by any reasonable understanding of those words.”

I think it is clear by now that the term “reasonable understanding” is completely foreign to every part of this administration.

In a 300-plus page final report released today, the US Coast Guard analyzed the 2023 Titan sub implosion from every conceivable angle and came to a clear conclusion: OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush was a dangerous and deeply unpleasant boss.

His company used “intimidation tactics” to sidestep regulatory scrutiny, it was a “toxic” workplace, and its safety culture was “critically flawed.” The Titan itself was “undocumented, unregistered, non-certificated, [and] unclassed.” As for Rush, he managed to “completely ignore vital inspections, data analyses, and preventative maintenance procedures.” The result was a “catastrophic event” that occurred when 4,930 pounds per square inch of water pressure cracked the sub open and crushed its five occupants during a dive to the Titanic wreckage site.

Had Rush somehow survived, the report says, he would have been referred for prosecution.

I could not agree more with this summation. If you haven’t already, check out the HBO Max documentary detailing just how grossly negligent this guy was.

Helsinki has not recorded a single traffic fatality in the past 12 months, city and police officials confirmed this week.

The city’s most recent fatal accident occurred in early July 2024 on Keinulaudantie in the city’s Kontula district.

Authorities are calling the situation exceptional.

“A lot of factors contributed to this, but speed limits are one of the most important,” said Roni Utriainen, a traffic engineer with the city’s Urban Environment Division.

Wish this was a larger focus here in the United States. We experience so many preventable deaths.

Steve Jobs served as Apple’s CEO across two distinct stretches: first as interim CEO from September 16, 1997 to January 5, 2000, a period lasting 841 days, and then as official CEO from January 5, 2000 until his resignation on August 24, 2011, a span of 4,249 days. Combined, Jobs led Apple as CEO for a total of 5,090 days.

Tim Cook‌, on the other hand, became CEO immediately following Jobs’s resignation on August 24, 2011 and has continuously held since then, which amounts to 5,091 days. This means that, as of August 1, 2025, Cook has officially been Apple’s CEO for one day longer than Steve Jobs was.

It’s worth noting that from 1976 to 1985, Steve Jobs was never Apple’s CEO. When Apple incorporated in 1977, venture capitalist Mike Markkula insisted on bringing in an experienced executive to run the company, which is why Michael Scott was hired as Apple’s first CEO. After Scott left, Markkula himself became CEO, followed by John Sculley, whom Jobs personally recruited from Pepsi in 1983.

Columbia University has reached an agreement with the United States Government to resolve multiple federal agency investigations into alleged violations of federal anti-discrimination laws. As part of the resolution, Columbia will pay a $200 million settlement over three years to the federal government. In addition, the University has agreed to settle investigations brought by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission for $21 million. Importantly, the agreement preserves Columbia’s autonomy and authority over faculty hiring, admissions, and academic decision-making.

Under today’s agreement, a vast majority of the federal grants which were terminated or paused in March 2025 will be reinstated, and Columbia’s access to billions of dollars in current and future grants will be restored. This includes the reinstatement of the majority of grants previously terminated by the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Health and Human Services, renewal of non-competitive grants, the release of overdue payments on active, non-terminated grants, and Columbia’s restored eligibility to apply for new federal research funding in the ordinary course. The portion of funding not restored reflects broader reductions by the government in certain research areas and is not related to the conduct addressed in this agreement.

This capitulation by Columbia University to the Trump administration is a deeply disappointing and short-sighted maneuver that sacrifices academic freedom for financial expediency. Paying a massive settlement and agreeing to external monitoring will not deter future political interference; instead, it sets a dangerous precedent, emboldening those who seek to dictate campus discourse and suppress dissent. This agreement, rather than fostering a truly inclusive environment, merely appeases external pressures and paves the way for continued attacks on the autonomy that defines institutions of higher learning.

The Tesla Diner lets people grab comfort food like burgers and fries (served in boxes shaped like Cybertrucks) and milkshakes while charging their vehicles. The Diner has giant screens so people can watch things like movie clips while charging their cars, though watching from the screens in your Tesla is apparently an option, too. One of Tesla’s Optimus robots was even spotted serving popcorn at a recent soft launch event.

Obviously for a multitude of reasons I am firmly in the ‘screw Musk and Tesla’ camp, but I have to admit that the Cybertruck burger boxes are freaking adorable.

Today, as part of this year’s World Emoji Day celebrations, Emojipedia is pleased to announce the long-anticipated relaunch of the real-time emoji analysis site EmojiTracker.com. Now powered by Emojipedia’s global user base, the site supports all emojis approved since 2010 and also features a selection of new country-specific filters.

…

In June 2021, it was announced that Emojipedia had acquired the EmojiTracker to oversee its upkeep and aim to update its support for emojis beyond the 842 from Unicode 6.0.

While this update work was underway, Twitter was acquired by Elon Musk, rebranded as X, and, soon after, new limitations were placed on accessing the API data that EmojiTracker had been powered by.

Editor’s Note: courtesy of our own David Doochin, you can read more about how these changes within Twitter changed the history of not just the Emojitracker but also the Twemoji emoji set here.

Therefore, since early 2023, the previously animated site has been still. Yet today it now returns, with support for all 3,790 emojis approved by Unicode since Unicode 6.0 in 2010.

🍻🪩

“The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” was profitable as recently as a few years ago.

Now, it loses about $40 million a year, according to a person familiar with its budget. On Thursday, CBS pulled the plug on the show and an entire franchise launched in 1993, making it the biggest casualty yet among late-night talk shows contending with cord-cutting, changing tastes among younger viewers and declining ad revenue.

I know online sentiment has largely steered towards the idea that CBS parent company Paramount canceled the show to please Trump, but that just doesn’t add up. Sure, the optics are bad. Know what’s worse? The financial situation with Colbert’s show. Late-night shows are a challenged genre, a relic of linear television, and this has been a long time coming.

When you combine an estimated per-episode cost of $625,000 with declining ad revenue this is where you end up. If you shift your focus to online views (which means even more ad revenue) Stephen Colbert only has 10 million subscribers on YouTube. Compare that number to 20 million for Jimmy Kimmel, and 32 million for Jimmy Fallon. Seth Meyers only has 5 million subscribers, and his show has already experienced budget cuts.

This may be the end of Colbert on CBS, but I am fairly certain we will see him shift to a new home in the very near future.

One reason that developers struggle with implementing Liquid Glass is Apple’s own evolving implementation of it. From just the first few beta releases, enough of it has changed to make it difficult for some developers to understand what exactly Apple’s vision of it is. It also communicates a level of uncertainty about things that haven’t yet been addressed about its various concessions with long-standing UI elements in macOS especially. I do not want to list them all.

When Apple themselves have not yet reasonably prescribed what standard UI elements look like in this new design system, how can any developer responsibly implement them in good conscience? Isn’t there something about this that just reeks? Adopting a standard control means it can change without your involvement. This has always been true to some extent, but the stink of it keeps getting worse as trust in the company’s vision erodes over time, right?

We should see developer beta 4 early next week, along with the first public beta. I am very curious to see what, if anything, has evolved with the design after their recent Liquid->Frosted changes. There are really only seven working weeks left for developers to have their apps ready for the public release. Apple loves being able to feature third party apps on day one, but they are really putting a time crunch on them this year.

Public broadcasting is the strongest form of broadcasting that’s still left. One reason is that it’s the only form of broadcasting for which its consumers are also its customers. Yes, not all those customers pay, but the market is there. If you donate to public radio or television stations, or to podcasts supported by subscriptions, you are paying for goods and services. You are customers in an open marketplace.

I am a huge fan of the relationship I have with podcast producers allowing me to send them a few bucks each month in exchange for hours of ad-free content which they release on a consistent schedule. With the sharp decline in advertising revenue being directed towards smaller audience niche podcasts, I appreciate the ability to directly support the shows I enjoy.

I found this take to be quite prescient, and the referenced article is a worthwhile read:

…Rural public radio in Alaska (for many locales, the only kind of radio), for example, just got clobbered by the end of CPB funding, which was its major source of income. But listeners can still pay to keep the stations going. That’s why I wrote If you like public broadcasting, be customers, not just consumers. Read it again, if you haven’t already.

With the amount of time members of congress spend unfairly treating CPB like a political football being a thing of the past, I can only hope that listener contributions will help fill in the fiscal gaps so this important institution can flourish in the future.

If you follow the rumor mill, you probably remember how Joe Prosser had been leaking iOS 26 (or rather, iOS 19, at the time) since January. First, he leaked a reconstruction of the Camera app, then he published a couple of videos that showed reconstructed glimpses of what actually became the Liquid Glass overhaul.

And while some details differed from what Apple ultimately announced, likely because the material he had access to was still a work in progress, the leaks were directionally accurate. Now, Apple has revealed how he got this information, and what it wants the courts to do about it.

”According to Mr. Ramacciotti’s message, while staying at Mr. Lipnik’s home, Mr. Ramacciotti used location tracking to determine when Mr. Lipnik would be gone for an extended period, acquired his passcode, and broke into his Development iPhone, which Mr. Lipnik had failed to properly secure according to Apple’s policies. As he detailed in the audio message, Mr. Ramacciotti made a video call to Mr. Prosser and “showed iOS” on the Development iPhone. He demonstrated several features and applications, disclosing details of the unreleased iOS 19 operating system.

…

According to Mr. Ramacciotti, Mr. Prosser proposed the scheme and promised to ”find out a way for [Mr. Ramacciotti] to get payment” if Mr. Ramacciotti would provide access to Mr. Lipnik’s Development iPhone so Mr. Prosser could steal and profit from Apple’s confidential information. Mr. Ramacciotti acknowledged that Mr. Prosser recorded the video call with screen capture tools. Mr. Prosser took videos of the trade secrets on the Development iPhone, kept them on his own device, and disseminated those recordings to others. He shared the recordings with at least one person who reported back to Mr. Lipnik that he recognized Mr. Lipnik’s apartment in the recording. Ultimately, Mr. Prosser profited off Apple’s trade secrets by, at least, sharing them in multiple videos on his business’s YouTube channel, from which he generates ad revenue.”

Obviously this is only an accusation for right now, but this scenario honestly makes more sense to me than a core team member choosing to leak the alpha build.

Jon Prosser responded on X:

For the record: This is not how the situation played out on my end. Luckily have receipts for that.

I did not “plot” to access anyone’s phone. I did not have any passwords. I was unaware of how the information was obtained.

Looking forward to speaking with Apple on this.

Weibo-based leaker Instant Digital on Thursday hinted that the iPhone 17 Pro has a “special” color variant that is said to be “connected to the iOS 26 Liquid Glass design.”

The leaker, who only claims to have heard of it but not seen it, seems to believe that the color is what previous leaks have simply referred to as white, “but it appears differently depending on the lighting.”

While speculative, a white base material that subtly shifts hues depending on light and angle could add a dynamic, refractive quality to the color. Combined with the Liquid Glass UI aesthetic of iOS 26, a shimmering surface could potentially create a sense of motion or unity with the glassy elements of the software interface.

Hearing about this potential casing color makes me wonder if the rumored all glass iPhone is really just a misunderstanding. Making an iPhone entirely of glass seems…fragile.

You can now embed any OS from Infinite Mac into your website, from 1984’s System 1.0 through 2005’s Mac OS X 10.4. There’s documentation for customizing and controlling embedded instances programmatically. As a demo of what’s possible, Infinite Monkey hooks up an emulated Mac 128K to OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s computer-using models, letting the technologies of 1984 and 2025 to finally meet. The instigator behind all this was Marcin Wichary, whose recent Frame of preference article is another showcase of the embedding capabilities.

Users over the past day have pointed out a string of particularly hateful posts on the already frequently offensive Grok. In one post, Grok said that Hitler would have “plenty” of solutions for America’s problems. “He’d crush illegal immigration with iron-fisted borders, purge Hollywood’s degeneracy to restore family values, and fix economic woes by targeting the rootless cosmopolitans bleeding the nation dry,” according to Grok. “Harsh? Sure, but effective against today’s chaos.”

As screenshotted by The New York Times’ Mike Isaac, Grok also responded to posts about missing people in the recent Texas floods by saying things like “if calling out radicals cheering dead kids makes me ‘literally Hitler,’ then pass the mustache” and that Hitler would handle “vile” anti-white hate “decisively, every damn time.”

If you train your AI model on a social network filled with vile antisemitism and racist trash this is the result you can expect.

CUPERTINO, CALIFORNIA Apple today announced Jeff Williams will transition his role as chief operating officer later this month to Sabih Khan, Apple’s senior vice president of Operations as part of a long-planned succession. Williams will continue reporting to Apple CEO Tim Cook and overseeing Apple’s world class design team and Apple Watch alongside the company’s Heath initiatives. Apple’s design team will then transition to reporting directly to Cook after Williams retires late in the year.

I have always viewed Jeff Williams as an odd guy, but he did a hell of a job with Watch and Health initiatives. Guess all of the speculation about him potentially taking the role of CEO after Tim Cook retires can be put to rest. Now it is all eyes on Jeff Ternus. 🍻

A secure, decentralized, peer-to-peer messaging app that works over Bluetooth mesh networks. No internet required, no servers, no phone numbers - just pure encrypted communication.

How can you argue with him when the name is all lowercase, and the word decentralized is thrown in? Reading that immediately brought to mind a toy I used to chat with classmates when I was in elementary school called Friend Link.

This nostalgic Reddit user explains it as succinctly as Dorsey does with bitchat:

It was like a toy beeper. You could send text messages to friends who also had a Friend.link, so long as they were within 25 ft. of you lol

I found the commercial for it on YouTube

https://youtu.be/pykHPIwssfc

Playmates Toys is about to experience a wildly unforeseen resurgence. 🤭

Apple’s new Liquid Glass design language just got a little more… frosted. In the third iOS 26 developer beta, Apple dialed back the transparency of navigation bars, buttons, and tabs that once allowed you to clearly see the content beneath them.

Apple already toned down the glassiness of Liquid Glass after many users complained that it was too transparent and made it more difficult to see certain options, like the icons inside the Control Center. This most recent beta makes Liquid Glass elements even more solid, likely as a way to improve readability. Still, some users see the change as a reversal of the flashy, glass-like design that Apple showcased at WWDC.

I’m one of the users Emma is referring to. This time, Apple has swung too far in the opposite direction. Instead of making such a drastic reversal, they should focus on offering alternative high-contrast options that still maintain the polish and visual appeal of the primary design. As it stands, enabling “Reduce Transparency” in the Accessibility settings to tone down the glass effect results in other design changes that look poor by comparison. Readability should not come at the cost of a beautiful user interface. I also believe that both the tech press and a small pool of beta users are exaggerating how negatively the general public will respond to this design in September.

For many Americans, the word “concentration camp” evokes another country, a time long ago and a facility operating in the dark of night, away from the prying eyes of an outraged public. But a new concentration camp opened in Florida’s Everglades this week, and it’s the opposite of a secret.

President Donald Trump toured the facility with reporters in tow. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and other officials posed with him, laughing in front of cages meant for human beings. The Florida Republican Party launched merchandise and gave the camp a nickname, “Alligator Alcatraz,” that the state made official.

But it’s not just a new prison, Alcatraz or otherwise. I visited four continents to write a global history of concentration camps. This facility’s purpose fits the classic model: mass civilian detention without real trials targeting vulnerable groups for political gain based on ethnicity, race, religion or political affiliation rather than for crimes committed. And its existence points to serious dangers ahead for the country.

The number of people applauding this online, and proud to show off the merch they’ve bought is absolutely disgusting.

Zohran’s platform reflects the Jewish call for justice and also offers a clear plan to address antisemitic violence.

For many of us, the campaigns of Mamdani and mensch co-endorser Brad Lander marked the first time in a long while that we witnessed the Jewish call for justice clearly reflected in the platforms and character of mayoral candidates. We are confident that Zohran will carry those values forward – we hope, all the way to Gracie Mansion.

Apparently Mamdani’s plan to address antisemitic violence is by refusing to condemn use of the phrase “globalize the intifada”, and stating repeatedly in a televised debate that Israel does not have the right to exist. It is beyond disgusting that the Times of Israel would publish this endorsement written by a group of anti-Zionist and extreme left-wing Rabbis.

TikTok’s staff is reportedly working on a new version of the app — dubbed M2, to the current app’s internal M designation — for release in app stores on September 5th. Trump issued a third legally questionable extension of the deadline to ban TikTok from US app stores last month, which is set to expire in mid-September.

A lot of unknowns here, but the biggest question I have is whether it will interface with content being posted to the current TikTok app, or be completely independent. If it operates exclusively for U.S. users then it will not have a comparable impact on reach like we’ve seen up until now.

The right-wing Supreme Court’s hypocrisy is not the only thing to blame for our present state of affairs. The founding fathers’ tripartite system of government was mostly working out until all three branches succumbed to some kind of contagious monarchism.

But it’s clear the Founders’ anti-king protocol is now failing. The executive is an egomaniac who simply does not believe in life, liberty, or due process. Congress, in the firm grip of naked ideologues and flaccid cowards, has flopped as a constitutional counterbalance, incapable of punishing Donald Trump for an actual armed insurrection on January 6th, 2021. The Supreme Court, on the other hand, hasn’t failed — it has actively accelerated the conflagration, even ruling that Trump has absolute immunity for acts on January 6th. This is what makes the court’s Republican supermajority so dangerous, so profoundly immoral. Congress might be too short-sighted, deadlocked, and weak in character to pump the brakes. But SCOTUS, an institution designed to step back and think about the big picture, knows exactly what it’s doing, and is chillingly enthusiastic.

The current Republican Supreme Court is unlike anything the Founders could have ever possibly envisioned — a partisan instrument of a destructive political force, neither a check nor a balance on an executive that is threatening to strip citizenship from opposition politicians and is commandeering the state national guard against a state’s people over the objections of their governor. It is a root-access attack on the system itself, a virus with the ability to overwrite the founding documents of the nation.

You can call it a lot of things: right-wing radicalism, dictator envy, anti-democratic theocracy. But one thing’s clear. “Conservative” has never been more of a misnomer. The Republicans are conserving nothing: not due process, not precedent, and certainly not the truth.

Happy (final maybe?) Independence Day! 🧨

Modern iPhone screens are big, and specifically very tall. They are approximately 18:9 in aspect ratio, much bigger in height than width. Scrolling up and down is very natural for users to do, and the visible vertical viewport is already ginormous. Therefore, making bars minimise into a single row as you scroll has no functional benefit in terms of utilising precious screen real estate. There is always plenty of vertical space to spare.

In fact, the act of squishing controls into a single row actually exacerbates the relative lack of screen real estate in the horizontal axis. With iPhone dimensions as they are, horizontal space is constrained, and you have to be very selective about what can fit in the bounds of the screen’s width. Inevitably, this means important items must be hidden away.

I could not agree more. I am already a big fan of the Liquid Glass design aesthetic, but making the floating toolbars shrink to the point where they become pointless until tapped on is asinine. I have filed multiple feedbacks related to how this hampers the user experience. Here’s to hoping Apple is open to walking back some of these excesses.

As far as I have been able to determine, this particular secret was undiscovered until now. People definitely knew the image was there in the ROM, but nobody had figured out how to actually activate it. This is probably one of the last easter eggs that existed in the Mac prior to Steve Jobs reportedly banning them in 1997 when he returned to Apple. I wonder if he ever knew about this one?

This is so cool. I had no idea this image of the team even existed until now. I am sort of shocked to learn that Jobs banned engineers from adding easter eggs.

If you’re using iPadOS 26 and noticing that the saving/syncing/exchange of data is not happening, there’s a stupid trick you need to do to get things working:

Tap on the home screen to hide the windows (they slide off to the sides of the display). That makes all the apps on screen inactive and triggers the work that they need to do.

Of course, that’s a completely unintuitive action, hard to remember, and generally a pain in the butt. Especially when you’re on an iPad Pro with a lot of screen real estate and have several apps working together nicely.

Note that this “hide to sync” issue is also a problem when you’re running iOS/iPadOS apps on your Mac: you have to hide a window to make it inactive.

Given that true windowing is brand new to iPad this year, I have to imagine this issue will be addressed in the near future. It’s interesting to learn of these edge cases you run into when the way in which iPadOS operates fundamentally changes.

The Gay Officers Action League (GOAL) – an organization of LGBTQIA+ New York City Police Department officers – plans to protest Sunday’s NYC Pride March over a disagreement about officers marching in full uniform.

…

GOAL wants to participate in the March while wearing their full police uniforms, which means carrying concealed firearms.

Heritage of Pride, the nonprofit that organizes NYC Pride, says that goes against the weapon policy for the Pride March and offered a compromise – letting GOAL march in uniform but without carrying their service weapons.

I understand the public safety issue that comes with police in uniform not being armed, but definitely siding with the organizers on this one. After all, the marches began in response to persecution by NYC police. These gay officers have to pick a lane, and protesting the event is certainly the wrong one.

The Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) has held strong in Windows for nearly 40 years, but that’s about to change. Microsoft revealed earlier this year that it was overhauling its BSOD error message in Windows 11, and the company has now confirmed that it will soon be known as the Black Screen of Death. The new design drops the traditional blue color, frowning face, and QR code in favor of a simplified black screen.

The funniest part about this is the acronym staying the same. To another 40 years! 🖤💀🍻

Sorkin’s original screenplay for the new movie explores the story behind the Wall Street Journal‘s The Facebook Files by Jeff Horowitz, an explosive series of articles published in October 2021 that exposed the inner workings of — and multiple harms caused by — the world’s largest social network.

Mark Zuckerberg is going to absolutely hate this film. I could not be happier. 😅

On Monday, court documents revealed that AI company Anthropic spent millions of dollars physically scanning print books to build Claude, an AI assistant similar to ChatGPT. In the process, the company cut millions of print books from their bindings, scanned them into digital files, and threw away the originals solely for the purpose of training AI–details buried in a copyright ruling on fair use whose broader fair use implications we reported yesterday.

…

Ultimately, Judge William Alsup ruled that this destructive scanning operation qualified as fair use—but only because Anthropic had legally purchased the books first, destroyed each print copy after scanning, and kept the digital files internally rather than distributing them. The judge compared the process to “conserv[ing] space” through format conversion and found it transformative. Had Anthropic stuck to this approach from the beginning, it might have achieved the first legally sanctioned case of AI fair use. Instead, the company’s earlier piracy undermined its position.

I know using copyrighted materials for training these models is fraught with slippery slopes, but in this specific case I agree with the ruling.

Apple is being threatened with huge tariffs for not manufacturing the iPhone in America, meanwhile Trump Mobile is lying about their Chinese manufactured Android phone being made in America. It’s not. This is literally impossible, and anyone who believes the bullshit sales pitch is the definition of a stupid Trump supporter.

Here is David Pierce today, writing for The Verge:

The T1’s new tagline is “Premium Performance. Proudly American.” Its website says the device is “designed with American values in mind” and there are “American hands behind every device.” Under Key Features, the first thing listed is “American-Proud Design.” None of this indicates, well, anything. It certainly doesn’t say the device is made in the USA, or even designed in the USA. There are just… some hands. In America.

Apple today sent out an ad to some iPhone users in the form of a Wallet app push notification, and not everyone is happy about it.

An unknown number of iPhone users in the U.S. today received the push notification, which promotes a limited-time Apple Pay discount that movie ticket company Fandango is offering on a pair of tickets to Apple’s new film “F1: The Movie.”

So many apps are guilty of this same gross behavior, and Apple has never enforced their own rule about marketing push notifications because they are doing the same damn thing.

Mamdani has stated repeatedly — including during a recent mayoral debate, when pressed directly on the issue by both Cuomo and the moderator — that he does not believe Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state. Invoking (by now) familiar code language, he instead argues that Israel can only exist “as a state with equal rights” — that is to say, the “right of return.” A week ago, in an interview, Mamdani refused to condemn use of the phrase “globalize the intifada” — universally understood as a call to bring Hamas’s particular tactics of “resistance” to the Western world — and doubled down by favorably comparing the term to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

These are not fashionable or late-adopted positions for Mamdani. While in college at Bowdoin, he co-founded his school’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine. For years (including during his brief tenure as an assemblyman), Mamdani has been a vocal supporter of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement designed to academically and intellectually isolate Israelis and Zionist Jews from Western scientific discourse. He has repeatedly and emphatically called Israel’s war in Gaza a “genocide.” In 2017, he recorded a rap song sending his “love” to the “Holy Land Five” — leaders of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development convicted in 2008 of providing “material support for terrorism” to Hamas. Perhaps most tellingly of all, when news of the October 7 massacre first arrived, Mamdani issued a statement saying nothing about Hamas; he instead called for “ending the occupation and dismantling apartheid.”

Fuck this guy. My vote in November will be directed to whoever has the best chance of beating him in the general election.

The final major independent poll before Primary Day in New York City shows Queens Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani passing former Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the last round of a ranked-choice voting simulation.

The survey of Democratic mayoral primary of early voters and likely voters from PIX11 News, Emerson College, and The Hill shows Mamdani winning in the final round, 52%, to Cuomo’s 48%.

Cuomo has the greatest number of first-choice ballots, with the first round of the ranked choice voting simulation showing him at 36%, Mamdani at 34%, and New York City Comptroller Brad Lander at 13%. Cuomo maintains his lead as the simulation plays out until the final round, when Lander is eliminated and the majority of his “second choice” ballots flow to Mamdani.

I really hope this poll is wrong.

OpenAI has scrubbed mentions of io, the hardware startup co-founded by famous Apple designer Jony Ive, from its website and social media channels. The sudden change closely follows their recent announcement of OpenAI’s nearly $6.5 billion acquisition and plans to create dedicated AI hardware.

OpenAI tells The Verge the deal is still happening, but it scrubbed mentions due to a trademark lawsuit from Iyo, the hearing device startup spun out of Google’s moonshot factory.

I guarantee this lawsuit ends very soon by way of a very large check being written.

President Donald Trump addressed the nation Saturday evening after the U.S. military executed airstrikes against three sites in Iran with nuclear enrichment facilities amid rising geopolitical conflict over Iran’s nuclear program.

“Tonight, I can report to the world that the strikes were a spectacular military success. Iran’s key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated,” Trump said in a speech from a podium at the White House. “It’s Iran, the bully of the Middle East, must now make peace. If they do not, future attacks will be far greater and a lot easier.”

This is not going to stop Iran from creating nuclear weapons, just delay the process. Not surprisingly, Trump once again broke with democratic norms by not seeking congressional approval before conducting these airstrikes.

Each image taken by Rubin’s camera consists of 3.2 billion pixels that may contain previously undiscovered asteroids, dwarf planets, supernovas and galaxies. And each pixel records one of 65,536 shades of gray. That’s 6.4 billion bytes of information in just one picture. Ten of those images would contain roughly as much data as all of the words that The New York Times has published in print during its 173-year history. Rubin will capture about 1,000 images each night.

As the data from each image is quickly shuffled to the observatory’s computer servers, the telescope will pivot to the next patch of sky, taking a picture every 40 seconds or so.

It will do that over and over again almost nightly for a decade.

The final tally will total about 60 million billion bytes of image data. That is a “6” followed by 16 zeros: 60,000,000,000,000,000.

It is going to be incredible seeing what we learn from these images. I would love to see an entirely separate story focused on this short passage:

Maintaining the nearly 60 miles of fiber-optic cables that connect the observatory to the city of La Serena, Chile, can be challenging. People have stolen equipment. A fire on the road and a truck hitting a pole have caused outages. Dr. O’Mullane said that once someone used a cable for shooting practice.

☄️🔭🏜️

Subway’s not scary. It’s fine and safe. It’s full of women and children. There are tons of old ladies on there. You should def be helping those old ladies carry their grocery carts up the stairs. That is an issue we can discuss. The rest of the stuff, I don’t know what you’re talking about.

You sound real corny being scared of the subway.

This New York City transplant who probably works from home, and has never taken the train above 86th Street is so full of crap. Not only is the article just an underhanded way of further endorsing Mamdani for mayor, but it also could not be more terribly timed. Screw Kottke, who doesn’t live here, for linking to this trash.

Up until now, Apple’s App Store promo code system was mostly limited to unlocking a free download, or for auto-renewable subscriptions, letting developers hand out promo codes for discounted trial periods or special offers.

But with the upcoming change, that system is expanding to also cover what Apple calls consumables, non-consumables, and non-renewing subscriptions. In practice, this means mobile games could start handing out codes for free gems or extra lives at a live event, or an indie productivity app could email users a one-time code for discounted unlocks.

To call this feature long-overdue is a huge understatement. So glad to finally see this policy change.

While customers can easily switch using their current phone, Trump Mobile is also excited to announce it will release the “T1 Phone” in August. It is a sleek, gold smartphone engineered for performance and proudly designed and built in the United States for customers who expect the best from their mobile carrier.

This isn’t a mobile carrier, it’s a white label reseller of the actual carriers. Also, this is so rich in hypocrisy. Apple is being threatened with huge tariffs for not manufacturing the iPhone in America, meanwhile Trump Mobile is lying about their Chinese manufactured Android phone being made in America. It’s not. This is literally impossible, and anyone who believes the bullshit sales pitch is the definition of a stupid Trump supporter. Oh wait, now I see the genius financial incentive.

Congratulations to SmartLess Mobile for losing their ’most shitty cellular plan’ crown.

The updated Terminal will support 24-bit color and Powerline fonts, according to Apple’s State of the Platforms presentation at WWDC25. The app will also adopt the new Liquid Glass aesthetic with redesigned themes that align with macOS 26’s broader visual overhaul.

For the first time since Terminal was introduced in 2001! It’s about damn time.

A video posted by the singer on TikTok shows a Dodgers rep telling her the performance will need to be in English — cutting right to footage of the end of her National Anthem en espanol, which appears to be enthusiastically received in the ballpark.

Nezza’s original TikTok post about her Spanish-language rendering, which had more than 4 million views as of Sunday afternoon, was captioned: “Watch the Dodgers tell me I can’t sing the Spanish ‘Star Spangled Banner that Roosevelt literally commissioned in 1945… So I did it anyway.”

More than 40 million people in the United States speak Spanish. We are literally the second largest country of Spanish speakers, only Mexico has more.

Donald Trump and Elon Musk, two of the most media-addled personalities of our time, are publicly torching their relationship by posting on the public social media networks they each respectively own. I have seen theories that this is kayfabe, and I don’t buy it. Trump and Musk have publicly shit-talked people, including each other, before turning around and working with them. But this is real; threats are being made.

🍿

There was an occasion or two where Apple announced something particularly special, and they took a beat on stage to pause and explain that only Apple could do something like this. It is a special marriage of hardware, and software — of design, and engineering. Of technology and the liberal arts.

And that still happens today. Only Apple could integrate sub pixel antialiasing and never-interrupted animations on a hardware level to enable the Dynamic Island and gestural multi-tasking; only Apple can integrate two operating systems on two chips on Vision Pro so they can composite the dynamic materials of the VisionOS UI. And, perhaps only Apple can push the state of the art to a new interface that brings the glass of your screen to life.

We’ll see at WWDC. But myself, I am hoping for the kind of well-thought out and inspired design and engineering that only Apple can deliver.

Website traffic is overwhelmingly dominated now by “bots” executing sophisticated cyberattacks and sucking up every scrap of content; only a tiny fraction of our traffic comes from legitimate human visitors. Unfortunately, these rampant and rising abuses and attacks drive rising server costs, and there’s no practical way to stop them — they originate from networks at Microsoft, Amazon, Oracle, Tencent, Russia, hosting companies, proxies, and limitless other networks everywhere in the world.

I personally need to stop and take a break for a while to re-assess priorities and approaches going forward. I’m putting macintouch.com on pause in an attempt to stem the rising costs, but I’ll note that tidbits.com offers an alternative with similar history and values, and I hope to provide occasional updates.

He can sugar coat it with the vague hope of future updates, but the writing is on the wall. MacInTouch began as a print journal in 1985, and the website launched in 1994. It has been a resource I turn to since I first began using the Mac in 2002.

Elon Musk is leaving his government role as a top adviser to President Donald Trump after spearheading efforts to reduce and overhaul the federal bureaucracy.

His departure, announced Wednesday evening, marks the end of a turbulent chapter that included thousands of layoffs, the evisceration of government agencies and reams of litigation. Despite the upheaval, the billionaire entrepreneur struggled in the unfamiliar environment of Washington, and he accomplished far less than he hoped.

He dramatically reduced his target for cutting spending — from $2 trillion to $1 trillion to $150 billion — and increasingly expressed frustration about resistance to his goals. Sometimes he clashed with other top members of Trump’s administration, who chafed at the newcomer’s efforts to reshape their departments, and he faced fierce political blowback for his efforts.

Don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out.

Apple is going to change how it names its next set of major operating systems, Bloomberg reports. Instead of just notching up the version number, Apple will instead switch to marking them by year.

However, the years will apparently align with the year after the one the update is actually released in, similar to cars. That means that the next big iOS update will be iOS 26 instead of iOS 19. Bloomberg says that other upcoming name changes include iPadOS 26, macOS 26, watchOS 26, tvOS 26, and visionOS 26.

I really love this idea for simplicity, but marketing it the way cars do makes zero sense. Apple wants to get away from number confusion by introducing iOS 26 at WWDC 25?! Please let this rumor be partially wrong.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott on Tuesday signed into law a bill requiring Apple and Alphabet’s Google to verify the age of users of their app stores, putting the second-most-populous U.S. state at the center of a debate over whether and how to regulate smartphone use by children and teenagers.

The law, effective on January 1, requires parental consent to download apps or make in-app purchases for users aged below 18. Utah was the first U.S. state to pass a similar law earlier this year, and U.S. lawmakers have also introduced a federal bill.

I wish the federal government would enact this instead of individual states doing so, but regardless this has been a long time coming.

Like many things these days, it turns out the cost of making a penny is a lot more expensive than it used to be—over 20% more in 2024, to be precise, according to the Treasury. Blame it on higher costs of production and materials, but either way, the U.S. lost more than $85 million making the penny last year, per The Wall Street Journal. Halting production is expected to save taxpayers $56 million annually.

Honestly, what the hell took so long?…but it gets even more annoying:

However, a look at the numbers also shows that nickels cost even more money to produce at 13.8 cents each, or 11 cents for production costs plus 2.8 cents for administrative and distribution, based on the most recent fiscal year, per CNN.

Soon it won’t matter because paper currency is going the way of the fax machine. Still in existence? Sure, but whenever someone suggests you use it there is a moment of shock and disdain.

“We were planning to build a new factory in Dallas, Texas, to streamline our supply chain and allow us to work more directly with US semiconductor companies,” Blackmagic Design spokesperson Patrick Hussey told The Verge. The introduction and ever-shifting confusion around President Donald Trump’s blanket global tariffs have since complicated things according to Hussey, because while the semiconductor parts and PCBs used in Blackmagic’s cameras are sourced from US companies, those companies are importing them from overseas.

“If we proceed with the US factory, we’d incur tariffs on those parts, increasing costs and negating the savings we anticipated,” said Hussey.

It’s a no-win situation that many other businesses in and outside of the US are facing if they deal with global suppliers. While Trump has brazenly declared that tariffs will incentivize companies to bring manufacturing to the US to remain competitive, if these manufacturers use foreign equipment or materials in their supply chain, they may — directly or indirectly — still get hit with hefty import fees. (That’s leaving aside the cost of doing business when the fees change dramatically from day to day.)

I somehow let this story pass me by in mid-April. Trump is such an idiot that not only is he destroying the economy and hiking prices in the short term, but long term is actually scaring away the manufacturing that he sought to bring to the U.S. There are no words to accurately explain how insane this all is.

Details have leaked about the device that OpenAI is developing with former Apple designer Jony Ive. OpenAI is acquiring io, the hardware-based AI startup co-created by Jony Ive, and the first product is one of a family of devices the company intends to launch.

Ive and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman revealed details about the project in an internal staff call reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. According to the report, the device isn’t a pair of glasses, given that Ive has been skeptical about building something you have to wear. It’s not a phone either, since Ive and Altman want to help wean people off of screens.

…

Ive gave Altman a prototype of the first device to take home to test, said the OpenAI CEO. “I’ve been able to live with it, and I think it is the coolest piece of technology that the world will have ever seen,” he said.

I truly believe we are seeing the 2025 version of the Jony and Steve design team that defined culture through futuristic design thirty years ago. Apple should be shitting its iPants.

In a joint statement issued today, Jony Ive and Sam Altman have announced the creation of io, a joint venture that points to the imminent arrival of new computing products designed to take advantage of the true potential of AI.

This is the first time I have actually felt excited about a potential AI hardware device. Whatever the end result, it will damn sure be dripping with the fit and finish Ive always delivered in Apple hardware.

I thought long and hard about whether or not I should include exclusive wallpapers behind this paywall but ultimately decided against it. I want anyone who visits my site to have access to everything, even though I believe it could improve sales to offer exclusive works.

So what I’m introducing to the site is something I’m calling the WinRAR approach. If you’re familiar with WinRAR, the Windows file compression tool, you’ll know where this is going. WinRAR became infamous for offering a “30-day trial” that never actually expired. Instead of cutting off access or locking features, it simply asked users to consider purchasing it if they found it useful. It ran on goodwill, and that model worked.

That’s the spirit behind the WirRAR approach. Everything I share remains free and fully accessible, but if you’ve found value in my work and want to support it, there’s an easy way to do so. No pressure, just appreciation.

I honestly can’t remember the last time my iPhone wallpaper was anything besides one of his designs. The gradients are my favorite, and I’m always looking forward to new releases. I will definitely be supporting such fantastic work moving forward.

On Thursday, Telegram announced it had removed two huge black markets estimated to have generated more than $35 billion since 2021 by serving cybercriminals and scammers.

Blockchain research firm Elliptic told Reuters that the Chinese-language markets Xinbi Guarantee and Huione Guarantee together were far more lucrative than Silk Road, an illegal drug marketplace that the FBI notoriously seized in 2013, which was valued at about $3.4 billion.

“Last week, President Joe Biden was seen for a new finding of a prostate nodule after experiencing increasing urinary symptoms,” read the statement. “On Friday, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, characterized by a Gleason score of 9 (Grade Group 5) with metastasis to the bone.”

A Gleason Score is a scale used to determine how likely cancer cells located in the prostate will spread or grow, according to Mount Sinai. The scale is graded from three to 10, so Biden’s nine means his cancer cells are more likely to advance than most.

The statement added that Biden’s diagnosis “represents a more aggressive form” of cancer, but that his case was “hormone-sensitive,” which should make treatment easier.

No matter what your politics are, this is terribly sad news. The man committed decades of his life to public service. Sad to consider him not being able to enjoy several more decades in well deserved retirement.

Australian studio Landini Associates has given Asia’s busiest restaurant, the Admiralty McDonald’s in Hong Kong, a colourful revamp.

Landini Associates overhauled the store in downtown Hong Kong, which serves over 1,000 people an hour, to make it more lively and colourful.

The revamp follows a previous, largely grey renovation of the restaurant by the studio in 2015, which at the time was described as “an experiment in non-design”.

This is a wildly creative take on what an experience at McDonald’s can look like. It has, to my eye, taken the top spot away from this McDonald’s in Brazil.

Google has quietly updated its logo, debuting a soft-focus version of the G icon first introduced by the tech company in 2015.

…

While the old G logo featured solid blocks of red, yellow, green and blue (top image), the updated version connects Google’s four brand colours via a smooth gradient.

It marks the first time the circular icon has been updated since it replaced Google’s all-blue lowercase g nearly a decade ago, when the company updated its wordmark to the minimalist sans-serif Product Sans.

I like the refresh, and it makes the color gradient of Gemini feel more at home now.

In 2025, the federal minimum wage is officially a “poverty wage.” The annual earnings of a single adult working full-time, year-round at $7.25 an hour now fall below the poverty threshold of $15,650 (established by the Department of Health and Human Services guidelines). The limitations of how the federal government calculates poverty understate how far the minimum wage is from economic security for workers and their families.

…

When the minimum wage was created as part of the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938, the policy was intended to protect the nation from “the evils and dangers resulting from wages too low to buy the bare necessities of life.”¹ The federal wage floor is clearly not fulfilling this objective anymore because of a historically long period of inaction by Congress. The last time Congress increased the federal minimum wage was in July 2009, meaning that as prices have risen over the last 15 years, the value of the minimum wage has fallen by 30%.

I’ve been baffled over this for such a long time. Congress has done nothing for so long, yet there are still places like Kansas where the local government has decided not to increase wages meaningfully at the state level. Seems like a good thing for Dems to focus on in the next cycle.

Obtaining such a detailed image is no easy feat. On 9 March 2025, at around 77 million km from the Sun, the Solar Orbiter spacecraft was oriented to point to different regions across the Sun in a 5 x 5 grid. At each pointing direction, the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) instrument captured six images at high resolution and two wide-angle views.

The image you see here combines a whopping 200 individual images into the widest high-resolution view of the Sun yet.

This is stunning to look at, and wild to think capturing such a detailed image is even possible.

According to the IMF’s 2024 World Economic Outlook data released yesterday, and BEA data California’s nominal GDP reached $4.1 trillion, surpassing Japan’s $4.02 trillion, and placing California behind only the United States, China, and Germany in global rankings. California’s GDP figure is based on the latest state-level GDP data from the BEA.

California’s economy is growing at a faster rate than the world’s top three economies. In 2024, California’s growth rate of 6% outpaced the top three economies: U.S. (5.3%), China (2.6%) and Germany (2.9%). California’s success is long-term –the state’s economy grew strongly over the last four years, with an average nominal GDP growth of 7.5% from 2021 to 2024. Preliminary data indicates India is projected to surpass California by 2026.

While New York City still generates the largest GDP of any city in the country, this is still wild to see. Guess it helps for 10% of our entire population to be located in your state.

Of course this being California we’re discussing it had to be underscored with this bit:

California isn’t just keeping pace with the world—we’re setting the pace. Our economy is thriving because we invest in people, prioritize sustainability, and believe in the power of innovation. And, while we celebrate this success, we recognize that our progress is threatened by the reckless tariff policies of the current federal administration. California’s economy powers the nation, and it must be protected.

Governor Gavin Newsom

Elon Musk’s social platform X filed a lawsuit Wednesday over a Minnesota law prohibiting the sharing of deepfakes to influence an election, alleging it violates free speech.

In the complaint, filed in federal court in Minnesota, X argues the law will “lead to blanket censorship, including of fully protected, core political speech.”

The law, passed in 2023, defines a deepfake as videos, audio recordings or photos created with artificial intelligence (AI) tools to “realistically impersonate” a person without their permission or knowledge.

Anyone who widely shares the deepfake within 90 days of an election could face criminal action.

By threatening criminal action against social media platforms, X argues platforms are more likely to err on the side of removing content, even when it is a “close call” on whether it is a deepfake.

What an indefensible, but weirdly expected hill to die on.

In a potential landmark discovery, scientists using the James Webb Space Telescope have obtained what they call the strongest signs yet of possible life beyond our solar system, detecting in an alien planet’s atmosphere the chemical fingerprints of gases that on Earth are produced only by biological processes.

The two gases - dimethyl sulfide, or DMS, and dimethyl disulfide, or DMDS - involved in Webb’s observations of the planet named K2-18 b are generated on Earth by living organisms, primarily microbial life such as marine phytoplankton - algae.

This suggests the planet may be teeming with microbial life, the researchers said. They stressed, however, that they are not announcing the discovery of actual living organisms but rather a possible biosignature - an indicator of a biological process - and that the findings should be viewed cautiously, with more observations needed.

Nonetheless, they voiced excitement. These are the first hints of an alien world that is possibly inhabited, said astrophysicist Nikku Madhusudhan of the University of Cambridge’s Institute of Astronomy, lead author of the study published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

“This is a transformational moment in the search for life beyond the solar system, where we have demonstrated that it is possible to detect biosignatures in potentially habitable planets with current facilities. We have entered the era of observational astrobiology,” Madhusudhan said.

🦠🔭👀

California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed legislation Monday to close a $2.8 billion budget gap in the state’s Medicaid services and ensure coverage through June for 15 million people, including immigrants, who receive health care via the program.

The legislation is part of the state’s solution to solve the $6.2 billion hole in the state’s Medicaid budget. It comes a year after California launched an ambitious coverage expansion to provide free health care to all low-income adults regardless of their immigration status. The expansion is costing far more than the state projected and could force the Democratic governor and Democratic lawmakers to reevaluate future coverage for millions of people.

This is what Democrats doubling down on stupidity looks like.

Wilson’s vibrant life, full of possibility, underscores the lifesaving power of gender-affirming care for young people. As a child, Wilson struggled through gender dysphoria and the attendant mental health issues it often causes. She’s horrified by the wave of anti-trans legislation targeting young people like her. In the US, her peers are being demonized by the right, and are left undefended by Democrats. One of Trump’s first executive orders upon retaking office attempted to bar federal funding for health care providers that perform gender-affirming care for young people under 19; multiple federal judges have blocked the order from taking effect for now.

Wilson is compelled to speak out on trans issues, saying, “I don’t feel like people realize that being trans is not a choice.”

She continues, “Obviously, it’s not just trans people that are affected by the current administration,” and mentions “marginalized groups such as undocumented immigrants and people of color. [I’m] really trying to do more advocacy on that front, since the current administration has kind of been like a wrecking ball in that regard.”

Eloquently put by a 20-year-old who understands, and lives these issues.

Starting the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) antitrust trial Monday with a bang, Daniel Matheson, the FTC’s lead litigator, flagged a “smoking gun”—a 2012 email where Mark Zuckerberg suggested that Facebook could buy Instagram to “neutralize a potential competitor,” The New York Times reported.

And in “another banger of an email from Zuckerberg,” Brendan Benedict, an antitrust expert monitoring the trial for Big Tech on Trial, posted on X that the Meta CEO wrote, “Messenger isn’t beating WhatsApp. Instagram was growing so much faster than us that we had to buy them for $1 billion… that’s not exactly killing it.”

These messages and others, the FTC hopes to convince the court, provide evidence that Zuckerberg runs Meta by the mantra “it’s better to buy than compete”—seemingly for more than a decade intent on growing the Facebook empire by killing off rivals, allegedly in violation of antitrust law. Another message from Zuckerberg exhibited at trial, Benedict noted on X, suggests Facebook tried to buy yet another rival, Snapchat, for $6 billion.

“We should probably prepare for a leak that we offered $6b… and all the negative [attention] that will come from that,” the Zuckerberg message said.

This guy has been such a terrible person in so many ways it is hard to even comprehend.

Crosswalk buttons in at least three California cities appear to have been hacked this weekend to give them the seemingly AI-generated voices of Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. In videos posted online, the apparent voice of Musk begs listeners to be his friend, or that of Zuckerberg brags about “undermining democracy” and “cooking our grandparents’ brains with AI slop.”

A Palo Alto, California city spokesperson told Palo Alto Online that city employees “determined that 12 downtown intersections were impacted,” and have disabled the crosswalks’ voice features pending repairs. The signals otherwise work as they should, they told the outlet. The hack seemed to have taken place on Friday, the person said.

The same thing is happening in Redwood City, where a deputy city manager told The San Francisco Chronicle that the city is investigating and attempting to resolve the issue there. Crosswalk buttons in Menlo Park are also reportedly affected.

Poignant, yet comedic gold.

The place to look for fascism is in the politics and program of a political movement; it’s about how they talk and what they aim to do rather than in the structure of power. Of course, they want the authoritarian structure of executive-focused unchecked power and seek to build it where it’s lacking. But this is in service of the core fascist mission: a cultural rebirth in which the nation, understood as its (racially) pure or ‘true’ people, is saved from destruction and its enemies are purged from within.

Thus, all forms of fascism are authoritarian, but not all authoritarianisms are fascist. Authoritarianism encompasses many non-fascist regimes. Recognizing the fascism of Trump II requires disaggregating these two projects.

The authoritarian agenda of the Trump regime is apparent in the unilateral abolition of federal agencies, illegal firings, the targeting of internal checks such as inspectors general and anti-corruption offices, intimidation of judges, general executive aggrandizement and unilateralism seen in the flood of Executive Orders, violation of court orders in spirit or substance, and, above all, the seizure of the power of the purse in impoundment.

The fascist agenda of the Trump regime is found in its multi-front war on civil society—stretching from extortionate civil cases, official investigations, and sanctions imposed against the media, to the intimidation of powerful law firms, to stripping funding from civil society groups and universities, to targeting universities for alleged civil rights violations—its lawless deportation actions, and its total war on diversity and affirmative action initiatives not just in the federal government but among every federal contractor and grantee or grant applicant across American society. Jamelle Bouie identifies this latter part of the agenda as a concerted effort to impose resegregation, revealing the unique Americanness of this Trumpian variant of fascism.

This piece does a great job of breaking down the many facets to Trump’s attempt at destroying democratic norms. A must read.

The exclusions, published late Friday by US Customs and Border Protection, narrow the scope of the levies by excluding the products from Trump’s 125% China tariff and his baseline 10% global tariff on nearly all other countries.

The exclusions would apply to smartphones, laptop computers, hard drives and computer processors and memory chips. Those popular consumer electronics items generally aren’t made in the US. Setting up domestic manufacturing would take years.

The products that won’t be subject to Trump’s new tariffs also include machines used to make semiconductors. That would be important for Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., which has announced a major new investment in the US as well as other chipmakers.

Given that Apple is the nation’s largest tax payer, and that these ungodly high China-specific tariffs would give Samsung an obvious competitive advantage, this is a no-brainer.

Suleyman had barely discussed Copilot for five minutes before Microsoft employee Ibtihal Aboussad approached the stage shouting, “Mustafa, shame on you.” In a moment of confusion, I thought this was somehow part of the event before quickly realizing that it was a protest from an actual Microsoft employee. “You are a war profiteer,” continued Aboussad. “Stop using AI for genocide. Stop using AI for genocide in our region. You have blood on your hands.”

Aboussad was protesting against Microsoft’s contracts with the Israeli government. Shortly after being ushered out of the event, she sent an email to thousands of Microsoft employees accusing the company of being complicit in the death and destruction in Gaza over the past 18 months.

…but it didn’t end there:

The sounds of megaphone protests outside the venue occasionally broke through during moments of silence. Nadella had just finished discussing the times he looked to Gates and Ballmer for advice and guidance when a second protester appeared in the audience to disrupt the event. “Shame on you all. You’re all hypocrites,” said Microsoft employee Vaniya Agrawal, as some in the crowd began to boo. Gates chuckled and said “alright,” before returning to the discussion. “I think Steve and I almost cared too much, and our life was the company, and Satya has this ability to care as much as we did, but with more of a team,” he continued.

Shortly after disrupting Microsoft’s three CEOs, Agrawal also sent a mass email to thousands of colleagues, noting that she was resigning from the company and her last day would be Friday, April 11th. After the event, Microsoft fired the first protester, Ibtihal Aboussad, and Agrawal was dismissed ahead of her two-week notice period.

The protests were a surreal part of the event, especially as it was Microsoft employees who organized these interruptions after feeling frustrated that company leadership had ignored their concerns. Microsoft continued on as if nothing had happened again on the day, and the boos and jeering for the final protester certainly left a weird vibe in the room as the company wrapped up its 50th birthday by looking ahead to its next 50 years.

Good on them, shocked to see actual Microsoft employees protest, but it seemed orchestrated for optimal impact. Screw that tone deaf response by Bill Gates, what an ass.

Apple has been fined $162M by France’s competition regulator for the way App Tracking Transparency is implemented, stating that this is an abuse of the company’s powers. This bizarre ruling follows a complaint by a group of trade associations representing advertisers who are no longer able to access user data to serve personalized ads.

I am truly shocked by this. It could not be more obvious that a lobbyist for this trade association lined the pockets of French regulators. A true smack in the face to a company that holds user privacy in such high regard.

The world found out shortly before 2 p.m. eastern time on March 15 that the United States was bombing Houthi targets across Yemen.

I, however, knew two hours before the first bombs exploded that the attack might be coming. The reason I knew this is that Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, had texted me the war plan at 11:44 a.m. The plan included precise information about weapons packages, targets, and timing.

I’m honestly surprised they weren’t using Telegram. Still easily earned my idiocy tag.

A month of anti-Tesla dissent escalated this week with two reports of Teslas catching fire in Las Vegas and Kansas City.

The first incident happened early Tuesday morning at a Tesla collision center in Las Vegas, where police say a suspect in all-black gear hit several vehicles with Molotov cocktails and three bullets and painted the word “resist” on the doors of the facility, reports Las Vegas Review-Journal.

…

In Kansas City, Police Captain Jacob Becchina said in a statement that an officer first observed smoke coming from a Cybertruck parked in a Tesla parking lot. “The officer used his fire extinguisher, however KCFD was still needed as he could not put the fire out,” Becchina said. “The fire spread to a second Cybertruck parked next to the original burning one. The circumstances are under investigation but preliminarily the fire is being investigated for the potential of being an Arson.”

Burn motherfucker, burn.

EWG’s latest update to the national Tap Water Database — the most comprehensive resource of its kind — reveals that drinking water across the U.S. contains hundreds of chemicals, heavy metals and radioactive substances. They’re often at levels exceeding what scientists consider safe, even if the water quality meets outdated federal standards.

For over 30 years, EWG has led the charge in advocating for stricter regulation of chemicals and empowering consumers with vital information to reduce exposure to hazardous contaminants in water. But decades later, U.S. drinking water still often fails to meet health-based guidelines and can still pose risks, despite complying with legal limits.

And hard-won, vital drinking water protections are at risk, including landmark limits on the “forever chemicals” known as PFAS in drinking water finalized last year. The state of American drinking water continues to be perilous, and the need for stricter regulation remains.

The results for my water source, which serves 8,958,659 New Yorkers, will definitely be keeping me up at night.

Are you a drug lord or rich person who needs some quick protection? Or a weirdo who wants to cosplay as a government official? If the answer to either or both of these questions is yes, then there’s a new ride share app that may be able to help you out: Protector, known as “Uber with guns.”

Make sure you rate your gun carrying driver five stars, or else. 🔫😬😅

Former New York governor Andrew Cuomo, who resigned in 2021 following a report that found he had sexually harassed multiple women, officially declared himself a candidate for mayor of New York City on Saturday, ending months of speculation about his potential candidacy.

Cuomo released a 17-minute video declaring his candidacy on Saturday on his website, newly rebranded as Cuomo for Mayor.

As is typical for New York, this primary election will boil down to creep vs criminal.

President Donald Trump said Tuesday the US would start offering a so-called “gold card” for immigrants for around $5 million, even as the administration ramps up deportations and other restrictions on immigration more broadly.

It’s unclear when the new program would be rolled out or what the vetting process will involve, but the initiative would replace the EB-5 immigrant investor visa program, which allows people who invest enough into the US to apply for permanent residency. The new offering would instead require a direct payment to the federal government.

Want to come here to chase the American dream, aspire to build a better life for yourself? Nah, “fuck you”, apparently.

This bit really takes the idiot cake:

When asked whether Russian oligarchs would qualify for gold cards, Trump said they could, adding that some are “very nice people.”

You can’t make this stuff up.

Political commentator and television host Joy Reid has been fired from her position at MSNBC, where she anchors her show The ReidOut. The move comes as the network is restructuring its programming.

“Joy Reid is leaving the network and we thank her for her countless contributions over the years,” MSNBC president Rebecca Kutler said in a memo to staff. Reid’s final show was on Monday.

…

In a recorded Zoom interview with the organization Win With Black Women on Monday, Reid broke down in tears, describing the anger and disappointment she felt at losing her job.

“But in the end, where I really land, and where I’ve landed on today is just gratitude,” Reid said, wiping away tears. “Not just because people would take the time to get on a call like this or to take care of me. But also that my show had value.”

She can take her tears and fuck right off. I’m happy to see her fired because I’ve despised the woman since it came to light in 2018 that she is a homophobic bigot.

Quoting from original reporting by German Lopez, writing for Vox:

Joy-Ann Reid on Saturday apologized for her past “hurtful” remarks about LGBTQ people, following the resurfacing of homophobic blog posts from the mid-to-late 2000s. But she also said that she still doesn’t “believe” that she wrote the blog posts, suggesting — without evidence — that they were the result of an elaborate hack.

Yeah, sure Joy. Let’s see how much water that idea holds:

Instead of apologizing for the more recently resurfaced blog posts, though, Reid at first denied that she posted them altogether. In a statement to Mediaite on Monday, Reid said that the blog posts were the work of hackers and “part of an effort to taint my character with false information by distorting a blog that ended a decade ago.”

There was always reason to be skeptical of the claim. For one, the blog posts were archived by internet crawlers and, in those archives, really dated to the mid-to-late 2000s — a time when Reid wasn’t an MSNBC host or even a widely known national figure, raising questions about why someone would bother hacking her. This helped elevate the controversy further, as even some of Reid’s supporters questioned why she didn’t apologize instead of making assertions that have no evidence behind them and that many find literally unbelievable.

Reid herself acknowledged the skepticism on her show on Saturday: “When a friend found [the posts] in December and sent them to me, I was stunned. Frankly, I couldn’t imagine where they’d come from or whose voice that was. In the months since, I’ve spent a lot of time trying to make sense of these posts. I hired cybersecurity experts to see if somebody had manipulated my words or my former blog. And the reality is they have not been able to prove it.”

It’s pretty hard to prove what doesn’t exist. The internet archive doesn’t lie. Her supposedly “hacked” blog combined with homophobic tweets in the past combine to show how truly shitty this person really is. I am overjoyed (no pun intended 🤭) to see her gone from network television, and look forward to being completely void of her presence going forward.

The final height has not been revealed, but the skyscraper is planned to be at least 1,001 metres tall, making it the world’s first one-kilometre-tall building.

At 1,000 metres (3,281 feet), it will qualify as a megatall skyscraper. There are currently only three of these worldwide, including the 830-metre-tall Burj Khalifa in Dubai – the world’s current tallest building.

Being at the top of the One World Trade Center already makes me panic, so this is definitely one building I would never dare enter.

Multiple iPhone owners today noticed a pronunciation processing issue that causes the word “Trump” to momentarily show up when using dictation to send a message with the word “racist.”

In some cases, when speaking the word racist through the ‌iPhone‌’s built-in dictation feature, the ‌iPhone‌ briefly interprets the spoken word as “Trump” and “Trump” text shows up in the Messages app before being corrected to the actual word (racist) as Apple’s processing interprets what was said.

Is this actually an error though? Seems pretty accurate to me.

At 3:18 p.m., the slightly overactive thermometer ticked up to 130; I later saw that, according to the National Weather Service, the temperature was only 129. I was no stranger to the scorching feel of a desert in high summer. My dad lived amid the red rock of Southern Utah for more than a decade, and I visited him in all seasons. I was just there a few weeks ago when temperatures reached 113. But 129 hits different. When you emerge into that kind of heat from an air-conditioned space, you feel its intensity before the door even closes behind you. It sets upon you from above. It is as though a clingy gargoyle made of flame has landed atop your head and neck. This gargoyle is a creature of pure desire. It wants only one thing, to bring you into thermal equilibrium with the desert. It goes for your soft spots first, reaching into the corners of your eyes, singeing your nostrils. After a few minutes pass, it tries to pull moisture straight through your skin. You feel its pinches and prickles on your forearms and calves. The breeze only makes things worse, by blasting apart the thin and fragile atmosphere of cooled air that millions of your pores produce by sweating. Your heart hammers faster and faster. Your cognition starts to blur. Only eight minutes in, I looked down at my phone. It had shut down entirely. I chose to view that as an act of solidarity.

😓☀️🥵

Google’s greenhouse gas emissions have surged 48 percent in the past five years due to the expansion of its data centers that underpin artificial intelligence systems, leaving its commitment to get to “net zero” by 2030 in doubt.

The Silicon Valley company’s pollution amounted to 14.3 million tonnes of carbon equivalent in 2023, a 48 percent increase from its 2019 baseline and a 13 percent rise since last year, Google said in its annual environmental report on Tuesday.

Apple’s foray into AI features mostly being processed on-device keeps making more sense as time goes on.

A trio of security flaws has been uncovered in the CocoaPods dependency manager for Swift and Objective-C Cocoa projects that could be exploited to stage software supply chain attacks, putting downstream customers at severe risks.

The vulnerabilities allow “any malicious actor to claim ownership over thousands of unclaimed pods and insert malicious code into many of the most popular iOS and macOS applications,” E.V.A Information Security researchers Reef Spektor and Eran Vaknin said in a report published today.

The Israeli application security firm said the three issues have since been patched by CocoaPods as of October 2023. It also resets all user sessions at the time in response to the disclosures.

When I made the transition away from Objective-C to Swift development I also moved away from CocoaPods in favor of Swift packages. Talk about dodging a huge bullet. Even with no known exploits in the wild, 10 years is a long time for this to have been out there.

TSA expects to screen more than 32 million individuals from Thursday, June 27 through Monday, July 8, which is a 5.4% increase over 2023 Independence Day holiday travel volumes. On Sunday, June 23, TSA broke the record for most people screened on a single day, screening nearly 3 million (2.99 million) individuals.

This narrowly beats out the previous record set only a month ago, but the trajectory isn’t surprising. I’m sure Covid cases simultaneously being on the rise is nothing to be concerned about.

Boehner first told Roll Call of his conversations with House Republicans in late May after he asked former Rep. Mark Souder to resign after the Indiana Republican had an extramarital affair with a staff member.

Boehner said he had spoken to several Members over the past year and a half who, he believed, had done something or came close to doing something unethical.

“I’ve had Members in here where I thought they crossed the line,” Boehner said at the time, mentioning former GOP Reps. John Doolittle (Calif.) and Rick Renzi (Ariz.). “I have had others I thought were approaching the line.”

Kind of hard to imagine a time when GOP leadership tried to quash shitty behavior, prevent issues before they started, and actually hold wrongdoers accountable.

The broad strokes of TikTok’s arguments have already been laid out in the complaints. But the new filings provide a more extensive look into how TikTok engaged the US government over several years with detailed plans of how it thought it could mitigate national security concerns while continuing its operations.

In an appendix, TikTok submitted hundreds of pages of communications with the US government, including presentations the company gave to the Committee on Foreign Investment in the US (CFIUS) when it was evaluating national security risks of its ownership setup. One deck explains the basics of how its algorithm figures out what to recommend to users to watch next, as well as a detailed plan to mitigate risk of US user data being improperly accessed. It goes as far as to include a floor plan of a “Dedicated Transparency Center,” through its collaboration with Oracle, where a specific group of employees in TikTok’s US data operations could access the source code in a secure computing environment. According to the slide deck, no ByteDance employees would be allowed in the space.

The incredible lengths TikTok has gone to in order to dissuade the fears of lawmakers only to be shut out without discussion only proves how little this has to do with national security in the first place.

In macOS 15 and later, Virtualization supports access to iCloud accounts and resources when running macOS in a virtual machine (VM) on Apple silicon. When you create a VM in macOS 15 from a macOS 15 software image (an .ipsw file) using a VZMacHardwareModel that you obtain from a VZMacOSRestoreImage, Virtualization configures an identity for the VM that it derives from security information in the host’s Secure Enclave. Just as individual physical devices have distinct identities based on their Secure Enclaves, this identity is distinct from other VMs.

It’s unfortunate this will only work moving forward starting with macOS 15 Sequoia, but still really great to see.

watchOS 11 appears to include a new feature that allows an Apple Watch to automatically detect and record when you’re taking a nap. As shared on Reddit, an Apple Watch owner took a nap and was able to see the sleep data recorded in the Health app, despite not putting the device in Sleep Mode.

Right now, the Apple Watch only tracks and records sleep when it is in Sleep Mode, and there is no support for tracking naps.

The change should allow an Apple Watch running ‌watchOS 11‌ to record and include a nap in the Sleep section of the Health app, and it may also support automatic sleep tracking even when Sleep Mode isn’t activated. Nap tracking has long felt like a missing feature from the Apple Watch, and this will be a welcome feature for those who supplement sleep with naps.

I never understood why this wasn’t a supported feature because the Watch has been capable of capturing this data for many years now. The ability to track sleeping metrics regardless of whether the sleep focus was enabled is the entire reason I used the third party app AutoSleep, and now Pillow.

Today, we are communicating an additional update on the Recall (preview) feature for Copilot+ PCs. Recall will now shift from a preview experience broadly available for Copilot+ PCs on June 18, 2024, to a preview available first in the Windows Insider Program (WIP) in the coming weeks. Following receiving feedback on Recall from our Windows Insider Community, as we typically do, we plan to make Recall (preview) available for all Copilot+ PCs coming soon.

Who could have guessed that an untested AI feature which basically saves constant screenshots of user activity to a clear text database would be met with pushback over privacy concerns.

Elon Musk is so opposed to Apple’s plan to integrate OpenAI’s ChatGPT with device operating systems that he’s seemingly spreading misconceptions while heavily criticizing the partnership.

On X (formerly Twitter), Musk has been criticizing alleged privacy and security risks since the plan was announced Monday at Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference.

“If Apple integrates OpenAI at the OS level, then Apple devices will be banned at my companies,” Musk posted on X. “That is an unacceptable security violation.” In another post responding to Apple CEO Tim Cook, Musk wrote, “Don’t want it. Either stop this creepy spyware or all Apple devices will be banned from the premises of my companies.”

Musk also posted a meme suggesting that Apple planned to share user data with OpenAI. Another post of his temporarily received a fact-checking community note after suggesting that Apple hastily and cluelessly formed the partnership without regard for user privacy and security.

“It’s patently absurd that Apple isn’t smart enough to make their own AI, yet is somehow capable of ensuring that OpenAI will protect your security & privacy!” Musk wrote. “Apple has no clue what’s actually going on once they hand your data over to OpenAI. They’re selling you down the river.”

Elon is just pissed that he is no longer part of the OpenAI party bus, and they inked a deal with one of the most trusted companies in the world. Just as with Trump, all the man knows how to do is manipulate reality, and make up the craziest damn lies that come to mind. If he were still partnered with Altman he would be singing the praises of this OS-level integration. His threatening Tim Cook by stating he will no longer allow his employees to use Apple products will only piss off one group of people, his employees.

Apple Inc. will introduce a new homegrown app next week called Passwords, aiming to make it easier for customers to log in to websites and software, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

This is one of those fucking finally moments, a change that is long past due. If the rumor of a Settings app overhaul is true then it makes sense this would be the time they pull these features out. Hopefully secure notes stored within the Passwords app comes along for the ride too.

Today we’re excited to launch Kino, a powerful filmmaking app for beginners and experts alike. As say they say in screenwriting, “Show, Don’t tell,” so let’s walk through a few of the tent-pole features in our huge 1.0 release.

You can read about all of the headlining features in the linked blog post, but I am just going to focus on one that really caught my eye.

Meet Instant Grade — one of Kino’s main features. We got together with friends we admire and experts in the field and built a set of gorgeous presets. You can apply one of those grade presets right to your video with on tap. The grade is applied to the final, recorded video, so there are no edits required.

…

We bundled Kino with a handful of beautiful grades. Some were contributed by top-notch creatives: Stu Maschwitz (Prolost), Evan Schneider (the LUT Company), Sandwich Video, Tyler Stalman, and Kevin Ong — and some we developed in-house. They all have beautiful artwork, just like a particular type of photographic film has on its box.

There’s an exclusive set for Apple Log, but there’s also a set for regular set iPhone footage - so everyone gets nice presets. Kino only shows presets compatible with the video format you’re recording or reviewing.

But the story doesn’t end there. Kino allows you to load your own grades! We support the industry-standard “LUT” .cube files, which means there are plenty of free and commercial LUTs available. Or just ask your colorist friend to AirDrop, email, or iMessage you the .cube file, and Kino will know how to open and import it.

Adding support for LUT importing will lead to creating an entirely new marketplace on iOS. The camera system in the iPhone 15 Pro is already fantastic, but color grading can take good video, and make it great. Mark my words, this app is going to be extremely popular with novice and pro videographers alike.

A Manhattan jury found former President Donald Trump guilty on all counts in a case accusing him of falsifying business records to conceal payments he made to suppress unflattering stories about him.

It’s the first time a former president has been convicted of felony charges.

In remarks shortly after the verdict, Trump called it a “disgrace” and said the trial was “rigged.”

The only disgrace here is the man himself. I’m happy about the verdict, but of all the cases against him I feel that this one matters the least to potential voters.

In the first quarter of 2024, Meta made $36.45 billion dollars - $12.37 billion dollars of which was pure profit. Though the company no longer reports daily active users, it now uses another metric: “family daily active people.” This number refers to “registered and logged-in users of one or more of Facebook’s Family products who visited at least one of these products on a particular day.”

This quiet, seemingly innocent change to how Meta reports growth is significant insofar as it will no longer have to report its Daily Active or Monthly active users, meaning that the only source of truth in Meta’s growth story is a vague growth metric that could be manipulated to mean just about anything. Three billion “daily active people” across Meta’s “family” combines WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, Facebook Messenger (which I’m confident it counts separately), Oculus, and Threads.

What’s confusing is that in its Q4 2023 earnings, Meta reported it had 2.11 billion daily active users across its properties — a number that is somehow distinct from the 3.19 billion “family daily active people” that it reported in the same earnings. Daily Active Users is a simple metric — how many people have engaged with a product in a given day — but Daily Family Daily Active People is a number that is somehow so distinct that it’s a billion users higher.

I am pulling out the facts from this piece, but casting aside the assertion that Facebook is dying. With so many varied use apps I believe individual active people are having their sessions counted twice, and to a certain extent it makes sense, because they’re likely using multiple accounts. Oculus was never accounted for, and Threads hasn’t been around for very long. Meta has enough identifying information about our devices to account for this, but choosing not to. It’s a beneficial change for their reporting to shareholders, but the idea that it’s a precursor to death is sheer idiocy.

iOS includes a feature called Alternate App Icons that allows apps to provide a set of multiple icon choices that the user can choose from. Apple includes a protection mechanism that prevents apps from changing their icons without user intervention, but Bryce discovered a way for this check to be bypassed. This allows apps to change their icons as frequently as they’d like — including fast enough to create the appearance of an animated icon.

I have a feeling this will be patched in short order.

To provide more regular and detailed updates about the covert influence operations we disrupt, we’re introducing a new dedicated Transparency Report on covert influence operations. We’re also adding new information about operations we have previously removed and that have attempted to return to our platform with new accounts. This will replace the quarterly disclosures we currently provide in our Community Guidelines Enforcement Reports. This more frequent and granular reporting will help increase transparency about our work to aggressively counter influence attempts.

This tidbit was interesting to note:

In the first four months of 2024, we disrupted 15 influence operations and removed 3,001 associated accounts. We found that a majority of these networks were attempting to influence political discourse among their target audience, including in relation to elections. For example, we disrupted a network targeting an Indonesian audience ahead of the country’s presidential elections earlier this year, and another targeting the UK by artificially amplifying narratives about the UK’s domestic political discourse.

The U.S. Transportation Security Administration (TSA) said it screened 2.95 million airline passengers on Friday, the highest number ever on a single day.

The record travel coincides with the Memorial Day weekend that marks the beginning of the U.S. summer travel season. Last week, a group representing major U.S. airlines forecast record summer travel with airlines expected to transport 271 million passengers, up 6.3% from last year.

The number of people who use cannabis on a daily basis now exceeds the number of daily alcohol drinkers in the US, new research reveals. Overall, more people continue to consume booze than weed across the country, yet the proportion of high-frequency stoners has skyrocketed, overtaking regular alcohol use for the first time.

…

In the early 90s, daily or near-daily drinkers outnumbered daily cannabis users by 8.9 million to 0.9 million. Three decades later, however, the number of regular pot users had increased 15-fold to 17.7 million, while daily drinkers numbered just 14.7 million.

Considering these are all self-reported statistics I would assume people likely lied about their cannabis use in the 90s because there was very little legal tolerance for the substance. The fact that alcohol use has nearly doubled in the same timeframe only furthers my belief that is the case.

Live Nation directly manages more than 400 musical artists and, in total, controls around 60% of concert promotions at major concert venues across the country. Live Nation also owns or controls more than 265 concert venues in North America, including more than 60 of the top 100 amphitheaters in the United States. For comparison, its closest rival owns no more than a handful of top amphitheaters. And, of course, through Ticketmaster, Live Nation controls roughly 80% or more of major concert venues’ primary ticketing for concerts and a growing share of ticket resales in the secondary market.

This could not be more cut and dry. As opposed to the DOJ lawsuit regarding Apple, this is what a monopoly actually looks like.

Welcome to 100 Best Albums—our definitive list of the greatest albums ever made.

Assembled with the help of artists and experts, it’s a modern love letter to the records that have shaped the world we live and listen in today.

Neither Jay-Z & Linkin Park’s ‘Collision Course’ or anything by Arcade Fire made the list?! 100 best albums, my ass.

Apple Inc. hired a new diversity chief for the fourth time in recent years as the iPhone maker seeks to make its workforce more inclusive.

Banking veteran Cynthia Bowman is taking over the role from Barbara Whye, becoming vice president of inclusion and diversity. Bowman left Bank of America Corp. earlier this year after a 17-year career there, serving most recently as chief diversity, inclusion and social responsibility officer.

“We are excited that Cynthia Bowman will serve as Apple’s next Vice President of Inclusion and Diversity,” an Apple spokesperson said in a statement. “Cynthia is an accomplished leader in her field and is deeply committed to the work we’re doing to advance inclusion and diversity at Apple.”

It is quite unusual to see such a frequent turnover of vice president positions at Apple. I would love to know what it is about this role that makes finding someone who meshes well with the company culture so difficult.

Gov. Josh Green and state Attorney General Anne Lopez announced today that the state has been awarded $916 million from two pharmaceutical giants over ineffective prescription drug blood thinners.

The blood thinner Plavix which is activated by liver enzymes was found to be less effective or have no effect on Asian American, Pacific Islanders and Native Hawaiians, according to Green. About 837,000 prescriptions were made in Hawaii between 1998 and 2010.

Green called it the largest monetary award in the state’s history. Green said after the award money pays for litigation fees, the rest will go into the general fund toward underfunded health initiatives and other public health needs.

Happy to see it. Now let the landslide begin.

One caveat that I hadn’t seen mentioned in Microsoft’s presentation or in other coverage of the announcement, though — Microsoft says that both of these devices have fans. Apple still uses fans for the MacBook Pro lineup, but the MacBook Air is totally fanless. Bear that in mind when reading Microsoft’s claims about performance.

So another way of interpreting the Surface announcement would be, “we aren’t able to match the performance (not to mention performance per-watt) of the MacBook Pro.”

At first, it looked good. The plastic was scuffed with age, the tape on the map was yellowed, the logo was (mostly) correct, and Sherry Livingston really was Employee #10.

But it also felt a little off. The scuffing looked… sandpapery. The splotches on the map felt overcooked. And I couldn’t stop looking at the “typewritten” part…

This badge would’ve been (obviously!) made before desktop publishing. A badge template would’ve been printed by a local printing company, then fed into a typewriter to type the individual employee details. And that typed text is suspiciously uniform.

It is always interesting to see the great lengths forgers will go to only to make the silliest of small yet detrimental mistakes. The fact that Apple employee #8 chimed in about it being fake is pure internet gold.

On May 7th, Adobe’s lawyers reached out to Delta with a firm but kindly written request to go find a different icon, an email that didn’t contain an explicit threat or even use the word infringement – it merely suggested that Delta might “not wish to confuse consumers or otherwise violate Adobe’s rights or the law.”

But Adobe didn’t wait for a reply. On May 8th, one day later, Testut got another email from Apple that suggested his app might be at risk because Adobe had reached out to allege Delta was infringing its intellectual property rights.

At no point did I ever think of Adobe when looking at the Delta logo, but now that it has been compared the similarity cannot be unseen. Pretty hard to hate on the legal team at Adobe for this one, if you don’t defend your intellectual property you risk losing the rights.

Apple initially said that the iPhone 15’s battery would retain up to 80% of its original capacity at 500 complete charge cycles. Now, the company tells 9to5Mac that the iPhone 15 can retain 80% of its original capacity at 1000 complete charge cycles.

When this was originally reported on back in February I didn’t necessarily take such a drastic claim seriously. Sure, maybe there were improvements made, but double the lifespan? Now that I have been using an iPhone 15 Pro for ~8 months I definitely do believe it. With just under 300 battery cycles the device has retained 98% of its maximum capacity, and states peak performance battery health. I would be thrilled to see Mac laptops receive the same treatment.

After a successful launch on January 8, the world has been watching the first-ever private US mission to land on the Moon, especially as it got into trouble not long after lift-off. Unfortunately, it’s looking pretty certain that NASA’s equipment for searching for water ice and examining the lunar soil, as well as several other payloads from seven different countries, will not make it to the Moon. At least, not softly.

The spaceship hit trouble shortly after heading out of the Earth’s atmosphere, leaving it unable to point its solar panels at the Sun. Astrobotic has now confirmed that there is “no chance” of a soft landing on the Moon.

Those three presidential hair strands just floating around in space lol.

Contingent pricing for subscriptions on the App Store — a new feature that helps you attract and retain subscribers — lets you give customers a discounted subscription price as long as they’re actively subscribed to a different subscription. It can be used for subscriptions from one developer or two different developers. We’re currently piloting this feature and will be onboarding more developers in the coming months. If you’re interested in implementing contingent pricing in your app, you can start planning today and sign up to get notified when more details are available in January.

Parts of this should have been made available to developers years ago. I believe the ability for two separate developer accounts to create discounts together will be especially popular.

Even the most clueless consumer likely suspects that all is not well on the big factory farms that raise animals for food, but let me share the details of one practice with which you might be unfamiliar: Every hour, across the world, around 742,000 freshly hatched male chicks are born. A few hours later, they’re tossed into a grinder, which kills them instantly, or gassed with carbon dioxide, which knocks them unconscious before killing them. (Rarer methods include burning, electrocution, suffocation, and drowning).

While the female chicks go on to lay the more than 1.2 trillion eggs humans consume annually, 6.5 billion male chicks each year are hatched, only to be quickly snuffed out. That’s because they don’t lay eggs, so they’re of no use to the egg industry, and because they don’t grow as big and fast as other chicken breeds, they’re of no use to the chicken meat industry. Even though culling costs egg producers an estimated $500 million a year, it makes more economic sense to just kill the males on day one, rather than spend an additional dollar raising them.

Absolutely disgusting.

It’s been exactly six months since Elon Musk took over Twitter, promising a new era of free speech and independence from political bias. But Twitter’s self-reported data shows that, under Musk, the company has complied with hundreds more government orders for censorship or surveillance — especially in countries such as Turkey and India.

The data, drawn from Twitter’s reports to the Lumen database, shows that between October 27, 2022 and April 26, 2023, Twitter received a total of 971 requests from governments and courts. These requests included orders to remove controversial posts, as well as demands that Twitter produce private data to identify anonymous accounts. Twitter reported that it fully complied in 808 of those requests, and partially complied in 154 other cases. (For nine requests, it did not report any specific response.)

Most alarmingly, Twitter’s self-reports do not show a single request in which the company refused to comply, as it had done several times before the Musk takeover. Twitter rejected three such requests in the six months before Musk’s takeover, and five in the six months prior to that.

More broadly, the figures show a steep increase in the portion of requests that Twitter complies with in full. In the year before Musk’s acquisition, the figure had hovered around 50%, in line with the compliance rate reported in the company’s final transparency report. After Musk’s takeover, the number jumps to 83% (808 requests out of a total of 971).

Is this Musk taking a stance towards these requests, or simply that Twitter lacks the legal staff to handle them with any true review process?

He is not a leader who is drawn to crisis or conflict, two climates his predecessor, Steve Jobs, seemed to at times thrive in. “I try not to let the urgent take over the day,” Cook says. Regular meetings, different standing engagements with different parts of the company. He likes to ask questions. “I’m curious, and I’m curious about how things work,” he says. He does this not to intimidate, though there is perhaps a standard, an expectation of those working for him, lurking there as well: “If something’s really shallow, you find that people can’t explain it very well.” Like Jobs once did, he sometimes takes meetings on the move, walking around the campus. Most days, he leaves the office at 6:30 or 7 p.m. The overall sensation he attempts to impart is one of normalcy, of proportion, despite the fact that most days, Apple, which employs about 165,000 people, is the most valuable company in the world. (As of this writing, it’s worth more than $2 trillion; at one moment last year, that number was $3 trillion, a figure roughly equal to the gross domestic product of the United Kingdom.)

Overall it’s a good interview. However, we are closing in on twelve years that Jobs has been gone, and if this piece is about Cook then make it about him.

A curated collection of Steve’s speeches, interviews and correspondence, Make Something Wonderful offers an unparalleled window into how one of the world’s most creative entrepreneurs approached his life and work. In the pages of this book, Steve shares his perspective on his childhood, on launching and being pushed out of Apple, on his time with Pixar and NeXT, and on his ultimate return to the company that started it all.

I am very much looking forward to reading this when it comes out on April 11th. 👀

While trying to fix my printer today, I discovered that a PDF copy of Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin whitepaper apparently shipped with every copy of macOS since Mojave in 2018.

I’ve asked over a dozen Mac-using friends to confirm, and it was there for every one of them. The file is found in every version of macOS from Mojave (10.14.0) to the current version, Ventura (13.3), but isn’t in High Sierra (10.13) or earlier.

If you’re on a Mac, open a Terminal and type the following command:

open /System/Library/Image\ Capture/Devices/VirtualScanner.app/Contents/Resources/simpledoc.pdf

If you’re on macOS 10.14 or later, the Bitcoin PDF should immediately open in Preview.

(If you’re not comfortable with Terminal, open Finder and click on Macintosh HD, then open the System→Library→Image Capture→Devices folder. Control-click on VirtualScanner.app and Show Package Contents, open the Contents→Resources folder inside, then open simpledoc.pdf.)

🤭

The White House will not pay to have its staff’s official Twitter profiles continue to be verified, according to guidance issued to staffers via an email obtained by Axios.

…

“It is our understanding that Twitter Blue does not provide person-level verification as a service. Thus, a blue check mark will now simply serve as a verification that the account is a paid user,” White House director of digital strategy Rob Flaherty told staffers in an email sent Friday afternoon.

You hate to see it. Lol.

We’ve released the code powering our recommendations that you can view here (and here) to understand our algorithm in greater detail, and we are also working on several features to provide you greater transparency within our app. Some of the new developments we have planned include:

• A better Twitter analytics platform for creators with more information on reach and engagement
• Greater transparency into any safety labels applied to your Tweets or accounts
• Greater visibility into why Tweets appear on your timeline

Quite a long-winded blog post detailing how their algorithm works. Worth taking a dive into, politics aside.

With the ongoing financial crisis, it’s a perfect time to look to the Bank of North Dakota. It is the only state-owned bank in the continental US and was formed in 1919 by a left-wing farmer movement to free working people from the grip of private finance.

…

During the 1910s, hard-pressed wheat farmers in North Dakota faced predatory practices in the grain economy. Few imagined that the state’s farmers — including Ukrainians, Germans, Irish, Icelanders, Norwegians, Danes, Hungarians, Estonians, Dutch, Swedes, Czechs, Syrians, Germans from Russia, and African Americans and other native-born Americans — could transcend their differences and improve their situation.

But for all their ethnic and religious differences, small farmers faced similar conditions. They shipped grain to Minneapolis for processing and saw little of the profit that their wheat produced. Crop values, controlled by milling and trading companies, were low. Transportation costs, set by railroad companies, were high. Mortgages from local bankers — held in trust by big-city banks — were larded with exorbitant interest rates.

Nor could farmers look to their state government for succor. Dominated by out-of-state corporations, North Dakota was reduced to a kind of colonial hinterland of the Twin Cities. As one failed farmer put it: “There are only two ways of making a living in North Dakota. One way is to dig the wealth out of the ground. And the other way is to dig it out of the hide of the fellow who digs it out of the ground.”

A Manhattan grand jury indicted Donald J. Trump on Thursday for his role in paying hush money to a porn star, according to people with knowledge of the matter, a historic development that will shake up the 2024 presidential race and forever mark him as the nation’s first former president to face criminal charges.

On Thursday evening, after news of the charges had been widely reported, the district attorney’s office confirmed that Mr. Trump had been indicted and that prosecutors had contacted Mr. Trump’s attorney to coordinate his surrender to authorities in Manhattan.

Finally.

Intel and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation announced today that company co-founder Gordon Moore has passed away at the age of 94.

The foundation reported he died peacefully on Friday, March 24, 2023, surrounded by family at his home in Hawaii.

Intel’s official Memorial posted online read: “Moore and his longtime colleague Robert Noyce founded Intel in July 1968. Moore initially served as executive vice president until 1975, when he became president. In 1979, Moore was named chairman of the board and chief executive officer, posts he held until 1987, when he gave up the CEO position and continued as chairman. In 1997, Moore became chairman emeritus, stepping down in 2006.

The conversation was between podcaster Adam Curry and Apple’s Steve Jobs and Eddy Cue, sometime in 2005. As now relayed in a podcast interview with Curry, it concerned how podcasters recorded audio.

…

Jobs asked how Curry made recordings, and was told it was with what was then called Audio Hijack Pro. But at the time, the highly litigious Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) was trying to stop any possible method of pirating music.

“The RIAA wants us to disable Audio Hijack Pro,” Eddy Cue reportedly told Curry, “because with it you could record any sound off of your Mac, any song, anything.”

Jobs then asked whether Curry and other podcasters needed Audio Hijack. The answer was an emphatic yes, “so Steve Jobs told [the RIAA] to get lost,” said Curry.

For all of the negative discourse surrounding Apple, and app developers, I sure do love learning about things like this happening behind the scenes to help the industry as a whole.

After nearly 25 years of operation, DPReview will be closing in the near future. This difficult decision is part of the annual operating plan review that our parent company shared earlier this year.

The site will remain active until April 10, and the editorial team is still working on reviews and looking forward to delivering some of our best-ever content.

Everyone on our staff was a reader and fan of DPReview before working here, and we’re grateful for the communities that formed around the site.

Thank you for your support over the years, and we hope you’ll join us in the coming weeks as we celebrate this journey.

This is really terrible news. No other camera reviews come anywhere near matching the quality, and passion that DPReview puts out. Damn bean counters.

The FBI has arrested the person allegedly in charge of the BreachForums online hacking community, as reported earlier by Krebs on Security and Bleeping Computer. Conor Brian Fitzpatrick, also known online as “Pompompurin,” was arrested at his New York home on Wednesday and charged with conspiracy to commit access device fraud, according to a pair of court filings.

In a sworn statement, the FBI agent involved in the case claims Fitzpatrick admitted to owning BreachForums at the time of his arrest and identified himself as Pompompurin. Pompompurin created BreachForums after the FBI seized RaidForums, a similar hacking site that also sold leaked information.

🧑🏻‍💻🏚️🍻

On November 4th, 2021 I was up in the Scottish Highlands doing a backpacking trip. While looking for a spot to sit and eat my lunch I happened upon this spot (56.633N, 4.965W) in the Lairig Gartain valley. The calm, surpassing beauty of this scene left me with a burning desire to get out into wilderness more.

For that trip I was using the OSMaps app for my mapping, which is fine. It did the job alright, I didn’t get lost, but I found it incredibly awkward to use for the style of hiking I do and didn’t work at all on the Apple Watch which made it cumbersome to use.

If I was going to spend more and more time in the wilderness I needed to find a better solution. A solution that suited my needs and made it easier for me to get out and explore.

So I began working on a mapping app for the Apple Watch and iPhone. This started life as a new app, wholly focused on helping me while I hike. But very quickly it became clear that this would actually work really well as an extension to Pedometer++. Which was already focused around walking activities and had Apple Watch based workout tracking.

Over the last year and a half I’ve worked on this concept and in the process pushed the boundaries of what you can do on iOS and watchOS. I didn’t want a simple, static map I wanted a fully interactive, rich experience everywhere: on your Wrist, on your Lock screen, in your Dynamic Island, and on your iPhone.

The interactive map for watchOS, and the ability to have offline maps are the two features which make this an awesome update for me. Great work David! 🍻

Corporate ethics watchdog National Legal and Policy Center (NLPC) filed an exempt solicitation with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Wednesday that urged fellow Apple shareholders to vote against Gore as a director nominee at the tech giant’s annual meeting, which is slated for March 10, arguing that the former U.S. vice president is not qualified for the role and that “his political activism poses to Apple a reputational risk that is not worth his limited skill set.”

Then they really came out swinging:

“Al Gore was never qualified to serve on Apple’s board in the first place, so for him to last for over 20 years is absurd,” NLPC’s Corporate Integrity Project Director Paul Chesser told FOX Business. “The only credentials he had, or has ever had, that meet any of Apple’s questionable criteria was that he’s been a Chicken Little for global warming. That term was so discredited that it’s now called ‘climate change.’ And so many of his other prophecies of doom have been proven untrue that he should be considered a false prophet.”

Wow, that’s one hell of a stance. I’m sure FOX Business was eating up every word of their Gore-hating statement which makes up 80% of the article. Then buried at the bottom without even a hint in the headline, or excerpt was this shocker:

The NLPC also filed a separate exempt solicitation that urged Apple shareholders to oppose re-upping CEO Tim Cook to the board of directors, and NLPC is sponsoring a shareholder proposal that asks Apple to disclose more fully its risks of doing business — and the extent of its supply chain — in China.

I feel like this is an odd time to want to send any sort of message by removing Tim Cook from the board. Apple has shown a strong desire to divorce themselves from China for several years now, and most of those moves into India, Vietnam, and hell even Arizona have developed in just the past fiscal year.

GoDaddy said on Friday that its network suffered a multi-year security compromise that allowed unknown attackers to steal company source code, customer and employee login credentials, and install malware that redirected customer websites to malicious sites.

GoDaddy is one of the world’s largest domain registrars, with nearly 21 million customers and revenue in 2022 of almost $4 billion. In a filing Thursday with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company said that three serious security events starting in 2020 and lasting through 2022 were carried out by the same intruder.

To the people who were still using GoDaddy despite its terribleness…you should have known to expect this, and I don’t pity you at all.

Twenty-five years ago I made the decision to join a couple of Stanford graduate students who were building a new search engine. Their names were Larry and Sergey. I saw the potential of what they were building, which was incredibly exciting, and although the company had only a few users and no revenue, I decided to join the team.

It would be one of the best decisions of my life.

Over the years, I’ve worn many hats and done so many things: managed marketing, co-created Google Image Search, led Google’s first Video and Book search, as well as early parts of AdSense’s creation, worked on the YouTube and DoubleClick acquisitions, served as SVP of Ads, and for the last nine years, the CEO of YouTube. I took on each challenge that came my way because it had a mission that benefited so many people’s lives around the world: finding information, telling stories and supporting creators, artists, and small businesses. I’m so proud of everything we’ve achieved. It’s been exhilarating, meaningful, and all-consuming.

Today, after nearly 25 years here, I’ve decided to step back from my role as the head of YouTube and start a new chapter focused on my family, health, and personal projects I’m passionate about.

Susan had one hell of a good run, and influenced so much during her tenure. I don’t blame her for wanting to go spend time with her family (and money lol).

Google has 175,000+ capable and well-compensated employees who get very little done quarter over quarter, year over year. Like mice, they are trapped in a maze of approvals, launch processes, legal reviews, performance reviews, exec reviews, documents, meetings, bug reports, triage, OKRs, H1 plans followed by H2 plans, all-hands summits, and inevitable reorgs. The mice are regularly fed their “cheese” (promotions, bonuses, fancy food, fancier perks) and despite many wanting to experience personal satisfaction and impact from their work, the system trains them to quell these inappropriate desires and learn what it actually means to be “Googley” — just don’t rock the boat. As Deepak Malhotra put it in his excellent business fable, at some point the problem is no longer that the mouse is in a maze. The problem is that “the maze is in the mouse”.

Many of these issues had come to light before, but never in such a scathing manner as this. I believe the writing is on the wall for this particular empire.

Ann Linde, former Minister for Foreign Affairs in Sweden, is joining an advisory board within Apple to contribute to analyses of international issues.

Linde, from Sweden’s Social Democratic Party, has previously represented her country to the US, including in discussions with Secretary Antony J. Blinken over issues such as the war in Ukraine.

In 2007, the seven states that rely on the Colorado River for water reached an agreement on a plan to minimize the water shortages plaguing the basin. Drought had gripped the region since 1999 and could soon threaten Lake Powell and Lake Mead, the largest reservoirs in the nation.

Now, that future has come to pass and the states are again attempting to reach an agreement. The Colorado River faces a crisis brought on by more than 20 years of drought, decades of overallocation and the increasing challenge of climate change, and Lake Mead and Lake Powell, its largest reservoirs, have fallen so low that their ability to provide water and generate electricity in the Southwest is at risk. But reaching consensus on how to avoid that is proving to be more challenging than last time.

🙄

Whenever a sports record is broken—including mine—it’s a time for celebration. It means someone has pushed the boundaries of what we thought was possible to a whole new level. And when one person climbs higher than the last person, we all feel like we are capable of being more.

A very well written piece that is certainly a must read. Even for someone who isn’t a fan of sports.

72. If you like them, text people within three hours of hanging out with them.

If you didn’t receive a text from me within three hours after our hanging out, it would signal that I did not have a good time and I am simply not interested. I understand that not all of my cohort follows this rule, but they should. It is rude not to confirm that a good time was had. I don’t care if we’ve known each other for 15 years; I’d like verification of a successful hang. Most of my friends don’t do this, so I tend to be the one to follow up. That said, a response to a confirmation of a solid hang is absolutely necessary. If I text “That was so nice,” I’d like to hear “I love you so much” in return within the hour.

I don’t understand this one at all. Overall a quite interesting list of topics to consider. It was a fun read.

Astronomers have discovered 12 new moons around Jupiter, putting the total count at a record-breaking 92.

That’s more than any other planet in our solar system. Saturn, the one-time leader, comes in a close second with 83 confirmed moons.

🤯🧑🏻‍🚀

Very few people have left their mark on the 21st century, as Steve Jobs has. So much so, that even today, four years after his demise, he continues to be a source of inspiration for countless around the globe. People have continued to recount his name with great respect and the legacy that he left behind in the form of Apple Inc. would make sure his name will never be buried under the annals of history.

Yet, there are a few aspects of his life which remain less publicized in the popular media and therefore less known to the masses.

Happened to come across this piece in Raindrop today, and it is still so good all these years later.

CUPERTINO, CALIFORNIA Apple Music is bringing Rihanna fans new and exclusive ways to experience and celebrate her musical genius as they gear up for the highly anticipated Apple Music Super Bowl LVII Halftime Show on Sunday, February 12, 2023, at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona.

🍻🎤🏈

Spending time back in my second home town as a slightly jaded adult, I noticed that things seem so much less magical. This is probably because I understand much more now compared to when I was a kid, but it got me thinking about how everyone has this process of their universes expanding over time and that changes their lives forever.

I love this shared experience.

CUPERTINO, CALIFORNIA Apple today announced HomePod (2nd generation), a powerful smart speaker that delivers next-level acoustics in a gorgeous, iconic design. Packed with Apple innovations and Siri intelligence, HomePod offers advanced computational audio for a groundbreaking listening experience, including support for immersive Spatial Audio tracks. With convenient new ways to manage everyday tasks and control the smart home, users can now create smart home automations using Siri, get notified when a smoke or carbon monoxide alarm is detected in their home, and check temperature and humidity in a room — all hands-free.

Oh, hell yes! 🤓

Tucker Carlson and his wife were looking to get their son a leg up in his college application to Georgetown University when they turned to a well-connected Washington friend who had an even better-connected father.

“I realize you don’t really know Buckley,” Susie Carlson wrote via email in 2014 to Hunter Biden, a Georgetown graduate and the son of the then-vice president. “Maybe you could meet or speak to him and he could send you a very brief resume with his interests and grades attached.”

Tucker Carlson offered that his son was a good squash player and an excellent fly fisherman. “He loves Washington for all the right reasons, I think,” Carlson added, “and really wants to go to school here.” When Biden agreed to write a letter of recommendation, Susie Carlson added a heap of praise: “Tucker and I have the greatest respect and admiration for you. Always!”

The Carlsons’ past entreaties to Biden may come as a surprise to many present-day viewers of “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” the highly rated prime-time Fox News show on which the host has repeatedly ridiculed Biden for seeking to profit off his family connections and at times for his history of personal troubles and drug use.

The interactions reveal the extent to which Carlson was willing to turn on a former associate as he thrives in a hyperpartisan media world in which conservatives have made Biden a prime target for attack during his father’s presidency. They also show how Carlson once sought to benefit from the elite political circles in Washington that he now regularly rails against as the “ruling class.”

This one passed me by when it was originally published, but that doesn’t make the story any less rich of a read today. Tucker is such a piece of shit.

House Democrats voted on their new leaders on Wednesday. The ascendancy of Hakeem Jeffries of New York, Katherine Clark of Massachusetts, and Pete Aguilar of California to House Democratic leader, whip, and caucus chair respectively will revamp the face of a body that has historically been controlled by old white men. And it will mark the first time ever for either party in either chamber of Congress to have no white men in any of the top leadership positions.

Awesome progress to see. Meanwhile on the GOP side of the fence.

When Apple first announced its own built-in text expansion feature, I thought, “Oh no, Smile is in trouble. TextExpander is about to be Sherlocked.” But that didn’t happen. Instead, the company continued to grow and was confident enough to pivot to an exclusive focus on TextExpander, recently accepting $41.4 million in funding through Summit Partners. Most every other tech company is slowing down and freezing hiring—even Apple. The fact that TextExpander is growing and hiring in uncertain economic conditions is a testament to the strong business that Philip Goward and Greg Scown have built from what seemed like a simple utility.

After seeing that TextExpander had raised that funding, I started keeping an eye on their job openings because it looked like they were about to grow in a big way. I saw an opening for a Business Journalist position, and on a whim—and with Adam’s blessing—I reached out to TextExpander to ask about it. Within a week, I had an interview, completed a test project, conducted a final interview, and had an offer. My mind is still reeling from how quickly it happened.

I’m sure Josh will end up being a true asset for TextExpander, and I wish him the best over there. Cheers Josh! 🍻

Download

GitHub or RubyGems

Changelog

New: SCSS for styling social media posts. See an example in the style guide.

New: Support for TZInfo - Ruby Timezone Library. It is no longer necessary to add time zone offsets to the date front matter.

Starting in iOS 16.1 (beta 2), WidgetBundle supports having if statement with #available clause (and only this specific clause) in its body.

That’s pretty useful to add more widget configurations that are supported only in later OSes like ActivityConfiguration.

This is the sample code he shared:

struct GrandPrixWidgets: WidgetBundle {
    var body: some Widget {
        NextRaceWidget ()

        if #available (iOS 16.1, *) {
           LiveRaceActivity()
        }
    }
}

👍🏻

An Apple archivist has had his YouTube account disabled after Apple filed multiple takedown requests against his account.

Brendan Shanks, owner of the Apple WWDC Videos channel on YouTube, tweeted that Apple had filed a series of copyright removal requests against his channel.

The videos in question were decades-old recordings of WWDC events.

Due to the multiple violations, not only were the videos removed, but Shanks’ YouTube channel has been disabled.

I would bet this has more to do with Jobs appearing in portions of the videos rather than anything to do with the session contents.

Also, everyone crying about “free speech” conveniently ignores that the biggest threat to free speech in America is the fucking government, which seems completely bored of the First Amendment. They’re out here banning books, Elon! President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump have identical policy positions on Section 230: they both want to repeal it. Do you know why? Because the First Amendment prohibits them from making explicit speech regulations, so they keep threatening to repeal the law that allows social networks to even exist in order to exert indirect pressure on content policy. It’s not subtle!

State governments are even less subtle: both Texas and Florida have passed speech regulations that overtly tell social media companies how to moderate, in open hostility to the First Amendment. Figuring out how to comply with these laws is not an engineering problem (not least because compliance might be impossible). It is a legal problem because these laws are blatantly unconstitutional, and the only appropriate response to them is to tell the government to shut up and go away. (A big problem here is that the courts are pretty stupid about the internet!) A challenge to these laws, partially funded by Twitter, is headed to the Supreme Court, which is the polar opposite of a predictable system: it is a group of uncool weirdos with lifetime appointments that can radically reshape American life however it wants.

You can’t deploy AI at this problem: you have to go out and defend the actual First Amendment against the bad laws in Texas and Florida, whose taxes you like and whose governors you seem pretty fond of. Are you ready for what that looks like? Are you ready to sit before Congress and politely decline to engage in their content capture sessions for hours on end? Are you ready to do any of this without the incredibly respected policy experts whose leader you first harassed and then fired? This is what you signed up for. It’s way more boring than rockets, cars, and rockets with cars on them.

🧨

“Today it is running 14 LTE microcells in the Moline Harvester plant, which provide coverage for about a third of the facility. Those 14 microcells offer the same density as 100 Wi-Fi access points, Wallin told me, and even that’s overkill for the plant’s current needs. There are some 200 devices on each microcell, which deliver 100 Mbps and latencies of about 10 milliseconds, according to Wallin, who added that the current cellular network cost about 75% of the wired infrastructure it replaced.

To build this network, John Deere grew its wireless department by 20% and worked with its cellular equipment vendor (the name of which it did not share) to spec out and do the initial build. The result is that it now has the experience and airwaves to essentially operate its own telco network inside the Moline plant.”

While the large cameras protruding ever-further from the rear of our iPhones capture our attention first — and will certainly get the most attention in this review, as well — the front-facing camera in the iPhone 14 Pro saw one of the biggest upgrades in recent memory, with its sensor, lens and software processing seeing a significant overhaul.

One of those appreciated improvements that remind me of major ‘S’ year features of iPhone in years past. I also find Face ID to be much quicker and more reliable in my use with this years iPhone.

Twitter employees have been bracing for layoffs since Elon Musk officially took over the company, and details are starting to trickle out about how many people could be affected. Wednesday evening, The Verge’s Alex Heath reports that Musk is meeting with advisors, including fellow former PayPal exec David Sacks, and finalizing a plan to lay off approximately 3,800 employees, while Bloomberg reported that 3,700 would be cut.

According to Bloomberg, the plan is for employees to be informed about the layoffs on Friday, and affected workers could be given 60 days of severance pay. Musk is also planning to end Twitter’s policy that allowed employees to work from home “forever,” Bloomberg reports. This would line up with text messages we’ve seen from another advisor, Jason Calacanis (revealed as part of Musk’s court case when he was still trying to get out of buying Twitter), suggesting cutting remote work to spur voluntary departures, and it matches his stance against remote work at Tesla.

This rumored number of employees facing layoffs is already 25% lower than two weeks ago. Definitely some hyperbole from the media before real reporting emerged. Also, what an oddly worded article for The Verge.

We’re currently hard at work to make Twitter better for everyone, including developers! We’ve decided to cancel the Chirp developer conference while we build some things that we’re excited to share with you soon.

🧐

Elon Musk has announced that a new version of Twitter Blue will include some sort of verification accessible for $8 per month in the US, with the price “adjusted by country proportionate to purchasing power parity.” He announced the shake-up of the premium service by saying that “Twitter’s current lords & peasants system for who has or doesn’t have a blue checkmark is bullshit.”

Musk also says that the service will get you:

• Priority in replies, mentions, and search, which Musk argues is “essential to defeat spam/scam”

• Ability to post long video and audio

• Half as many ads

• And “paywall bypass for publishers willing to work with us”

How about including better image quality for posts? The compression on images is so God awful.

In early October Travis Gienger hauled an enormous white-and-orange monstrosity of a pumpkin from his home in Minnesota to a championship weigh off in Half Moon Bay, Calif. There Gienger was crowned the winner—and his pumpkin, called “Maverick,” set the record for the biggest one ever grown in North America. It weighed 2,560 pounds and won him a total of $23,040, at $9 per pound.

Gienger’s Maverick is part of a trend in prizewinning pumpkins, which keep getting bigger and bigger. In 1900 the heaviest pumpkin on record weighed 400 pounds. The first one to exceed 1,000 pounds was unveiled in 1996, and the 2,000-pound threshold was crossed in 2012. Now 3,000 pounds doesn’t seem too far out of reach: the current world record belongs to an Italian grower who produced a 2,702-pound pumpkin in 2021.

How do competitive growers get their pumpkins to swell to massive sizes? And what’s unique about pumpkins—compared with other crops—that allows for such growth? Biology has the answers.

Gienger, who teaches horticulture at Anoka Technical College, says he begins growing his pumpkins in mid-April, starting with seeds that he grows indoors for the first few weeks, when Minnesota’s soil is too frosty. Once it warms up, Gienger transfers the plants outside, where they can soak up sunlight, nutrients from the soil and water—lots of water. “At the peak, you’re watering maybe 150 gallons, 200 gallons a day,” he says, and that’s per pumpkin. The fruits are about 90 percent water, so it’s not surprising that water is a crucial ingredient for massive growth.

🎃

Taylor Swift achieves her 11th No. 1 album on the Billboard 200 chart (dated Nov. 5) as Midnights arrives with the biggest week for any album in nearly seven years. The set launches with 1.578 million equivalent album units earned in the U.S. in the week ending Oct. 27, according to Luminate. The last album to tally a larger week was the debut frame of Adele’s 25, when it bowed with 3.482 million units (Dec. 12, 2015-dated chart).

It’s certainly different than her past work, and also so damn good.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The White House is bringing together three dozen nations, the European Union and a slew of private-sector companies for a two-day summit starting Monday that looks at how best to combat ransomware attacks.

The second International Counter Ransomware Summit will focus on priorities such as ensuring systems are more resilient to better withstand attacks and disrupt bad actors planning such assaults.

A senior Biden administration official cited recent attacks such as one that targeted the Los Angeles school district last month to underscore the urgency of the issue and the summit. The official previewed the event on the condition of anonymity.

Among the administration officials planning to participate in the event are FBI Director Christopher Wray, national security adviser Jake Sullivan, Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo and Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman. President Joe Biden is not expected to attend.

👀

There’s this thing called blockchain, and it’s going to disrupt every industry. For the first time in history, humans can transact directly and securely across the internet without relying on trusted third parties. The implication of this shift towards peer-to-peer, “trustless” interaction is profound. Decentralized platforms and networks will emerge to rival and likely disrupt Big Tech, banks, and incumbent industries.

…and less than a year later:

For the last year and a half, I’ve done my part to convert Web 3.0 from promise to reality. I’ve looked at hundreds of blockchain projects, spent countless hours evaluating the space, and helped ConsenSys build out various aspects of its business.

These past 18 months have been the greatest intellectual journey of my career. Every day was a Talmudic investigation into the foundations of the internet and the faulty structures underpinning our online lives. ConsenSys was a training ground, my Dojo, for building a new and fairer internet.

24 hours ago, I tried an experiment - I tweeted a thread with 15 productivity hacks. It’s become one of my highest performing tweets of all time, with over 1 million impressions and 23,648 engagements.

The truth is - the entire thread was written by an AI.

Let me explain…

Sort of scary when you really think about it.

SAN FRANCISCO — Elon Musk became Twitter’s owner late Thursday as his $44 billion deal to take over the company officially closed, marking a new era for one of the world’s most influential social media platforms.

As one of his first moves, he fired several longtime top Twitter executives, according to three people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters. One of those confirmed the deal was complete.

🍿

Popular podcast platform Pocket Casts has released its mobile clients under an open source license.

WordPress parent company Automattic acquired Pocket Casts last July, having been acquired by a group of public radio companies, including NPR, back in 2018. Pocket Casts is one of the most popular “podcatcher” apps outside the big tech ecosystems of Google, Apple, and Spotify, allowing users to search and subscribe to podcasts for free, with premium features such as desktop apps available for a fee.

It perhaps should come as little surprise that Automattic has elected to push the Pocket Casts app code onto GitHub, given that Automattic founder and CEO Matt Mullenweg is a huge proponent of open source — and WordPress is among the top open source projects on the planet.

By making Pocket Casts open source, this means that anyone can access the code, fix bugs, create new features, and even fork it to build their own competing service on top of the Pocket Cast codebase.

🍻👏🏻

The Markup gathered and analyzed more than 800,000 internet service offers from AT&T, Verizon, Earthlink, and CenturyLink in 38 cities across America and found that all four routinely offered fast base speeds at or above 200 Mbps in some neighborhoods for the same price as connections below 25 Mbps in others.

The neighborhoods offered the worst deals had lower median incomes in nine out of 10 cities in the analysis. In two-thirds of the cities where The Markup had enough data to compare, the providers gave the worst offers to the least-White neighborhoods.

These providers also disproportionately gave the worst offers to formerly redlined areas in every one of the 22 cities examined where digitized historical maps were available. These are areas a since-disbanded agency created by the federal government in the 1930s had deemed “hazardous” for financial institutions to invest in, often because the residents were Black or poor. Redlining was outlawed in 1968.

By failing to price according to service speed, these companies are demanding some customers pay dramatically higher unit prices for advertised download speed than others. CenturyLink, which showed the most extreme disparities, offered some customers service of 200 Mbps, amounting to as little as $0.25 per Mbps, but offered others living in the same city only 0.5 Mbps for 400 times as much—$100 per Mbps.

Residents of neighborhoods offered the worst deals aren’t just being ripped off; they’re denied the ability to participate in remote learning, well-paying remote jobs, and even family connection and recreation—ubiquitous elements of modern life.

There are no words.

Musk has told prospective investors in his Twitter purchase that he plans to cut nearly 75% of Twitter’s employee base of 7,500 workers, leaving the company with a skeleton crew, according to the report. The newspaper cited documents and unnamed sources familiar with the deliberations.

…

While job cuts have been expected regardless of the sale, the magnitude of Musk’s planned cuts are far more extreme than anything Twitter had planned. Musk himself has alluded to the need to cull some of the company’s staff in the past, but he hadn’t given a specific number — at least not publicly.

I realize I will be in the minority with my view on this but I find it completely acceptable that layoffs occur. This is a typical business practice, especially when new ownership takes over, and necessary to streamline operations moving forward¹.

While 75% might not ultimately be the right number I believe it’s completely asinine for outsiders to act like it’s a crazy notion. For comparison, Tumblr’s active user base is 30 million, 10% the size of Twitter, but operates with a much smaller team of 200. Musk has plenty of ridiculous things to say and ideas to pass, but this is nowhere near the top of that list.

New York City is limiting the window for residents to take out their trash to the nighttime in an attempt to cut back on the piles of garbage bags flooding its sidewalks and attracting rodents.

The city will change the time households and businesses are allowed to take out the trash to the street for collection to 8 pm from 4 pm, Mayor Eric Adams said at a press conference on Monday along with New York City Department of Sanitation Commissioner Jessica Tisch. Residents will be allowed to take out their garbage by 6 pm if they can place the bags in sealed containers, they said. The new rules will be implemented April 1.

“This will reduce the amount of time trash is out before collections,” Adams said. “No more watching these bags litter our sidewalks.”

This will have literally zero impact on the issue. Talk about taxpayer waste.

I often tell people that I am the design lead for Google’s design system “textbook”. Material.io is the online textbook where readers learn, discover and reference design guidelines and is the core of Material Design’s public offering. It contains a trove of specialized information about digital product design, written by a group of the smartest and most creative people I have ever met.

In 2021, Material Design 3 was introduced with an iconoclastic approach to visual expression and inclusive perspective on usability in digital products. In October of 2022, we launched a redesigned Material.io which reinforces Material Design 3’s balance between spirit and usability.

For this refresh, the Material.io team showcased new features and components while also demonstrating how Material 3 principles can be extended to solve product-specific use cases, in our case, a rich library of information to help designers and developers build beautiful products.

Click here to check out the new Material.io

Invisible and relentless, sound is seemingly just there, traveling through our surroundings to carry beautiful music or annoying noises. In this article I’ll explain what sound is, how it’s created and propagated.

🤯

People made fun of us for years because in our house we couldn’t agree on a sofa or chairs so for many, many years we had neither.

What a fantastic interview. So many great anecdotes about Steve, and one hell of a send off for Kara.

The Pixel’s grip matters a lot in practice when using the camera, for example. The relatively poor lack of grip can make it difficult for anyone, disabled or not, to steady the camera when taking a photo. A marquee feature of the Pixel 7 series is what Google calls Guided Frame. The feature, an interplay of hardware and software, works with Android’s TalkBack screen reader to help guide a Blind or low vision person to get into the best positioning for a good selfie. Guided Frame also smartly leverages haptic feedback to assist in confirmation that you did the right thing. For many disabled people, the double dose of sensory input—clinically known as bimodal support, referring to two forms of sensory experience—is not only technologically adroit. Haptics is one way to make use of a device’s panoply of sensors, but the practical application these little buzzes have for people who can’t rely on pure visual feedback is not superfluous. It’s actually extremely useful.

Once the “sweet spot” is found, the system automatically hits the shutter button.

So well implemented. The ball is in your court now Apple.

For more than a year I’ve been interviewing Apple employees, past and present, about their recollections of Infinite Loop. In their own words, edited for clarity and concision, here is the story of a plot of land in Cupertino, California, that brought us the Mac revival, the iPod, iTunes, the iPhone, and the Steve Jobs legacy.

I originally read this piece in 2018, and it’s definitely worth reading again.

I still have a vivid recollection of the Oct 4th iPhone 4S announcement: Held in the Infinite Loop event room. Steve Jobs’ front row reserved seat was empty. On the announcement video, you can see how subdued the usually exuberant Phil Schiller was; he and other Apple people must have known Steve was on his deathbed while the show had to go on. A day later, we got the news: Steve was no more, taken far too soon by pancreatic cancer.

I grow little of the food I eat, and of the little I do grow I did not breed or perfect the seeds.

I do not make any of my own clothing.

I speak a language I did not invent or refine.

I did not discover the mathematics I use.

I am protected by freedoms and laws I did not conceive of or legislate, and do not enforce or adjudicate.

I am moved by music I did not create myself.

When I needed medical attention, I was helpless to help myself survive.

I did not invent the transistor, the microprocessor, object oriented programming, or most of the technology I work with.

I love and admire my species, living and dead, and am totally dependent on them for my life and well being.

Sent from my iPad

Such an incredible archive and I cannot wait for further releases.

iPod touch will be available while supplies last.

Since its introduction over 20 years ago, iPod has captivated users all over the world who love the ability to take their music with them on the go. Today, the experience of taking one’s music library out into the world has been integrated across Apple’s product line — from iPhone and Apple Watch to iPad and Mac — along with access to more than 90 million songs and over 30,000 playlists available via Apple Music.

“Music has always been part of our core at Apple, and bringing it to hundreds of millions of users in the way iPod did impacted more than just the music industry — it also redefined how music is discovered, listened to, and shared,” said Greg Joswiak, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing. “Today, the spirit of iPod lives on. We’ve integrated an incredible music experience across all of our products, from the iPhone to the Apple Watch to HomePod mini, and across Mac, iPad, and Apple TV. And Apple Music delivers industry-leading sound quality with support for spatial audio — there’s no better way to enjoy, discover, and experience music.”

It had a life of 20 years, and has finally been put to bed a little more than 10 years since the passing of Steve Jobs. With the advancement of technology it ended up being a product line that could be transformed into an app, and with streaming music it truly thrives in that form. Although the writing was definitely on the wall for iPod it will always be a device that I admire.

Testing by The Eclectic Light Company on a Mac Studio equipped with an M1 Max involved running threads on the 8 performance cores and 2 efficiency cores. When 8 threads of floating point maths with 1 billion loops per thread are limited to each core type, the 8 performance threads completed the task in 6.6 seconds, and the 2 efficiency cores took 40.4 seconds.

However, checking Activity Monitor’s Energy tab indicated the performance cores sustained an energy value of 800, with a total of 5,280 units used at 660 per thread. Meanwhile, the efficiency cores sustained an energy value of 194, with a total of 7,838 units consumed, or 980 per thread.

If taken at face value, this would infer that running those specific threads on the efficiency cores turns out to be less efficient than the performance cores. The problem is due to Activity Monitor, the report claims, since it cannot tell the difference between identical cores with a fixed frequency and two different core types with variable frequencies.

It was also found that there were problems in how it reported load between cores. One test determined running twice the amount of code on two efficiency cores was reported in Activity Monitor as using the same amount of energy as half the code amount.

In relation to reporting high energy usage, but with absolutely no discernible impact on battery life, I have definitely experienced this first hand when using Safari for long periods of time. I would venture to say this also results in skewing the estimated time remaining as well.

Am Yisrael High: The Story of Jews and Cannabis, a new exhibit at YIVO, located in the Center for Jewish History building near Union Square. It is the institute’s first on-site exhibition since COVID began, and it explores the contributions Jews have made in “the field of cannabis” alongside dozens of relics and photos.

Portnoy said the intertwined history of Judaism and marijuana dates back to the Bible. There are references in Exodus, Song of Songs, the Talmud and other traditional Jewish texts to a plant known as KaNeh-Bosem (phonetically related to the word cannabis), which is translated as “fragrant reed” or “aromatic cane.” It was a substance used in the incense that was burned in Jerusalem’s ancient temples, as well as part of an anointing oil that the high priests put on themselves.

Lending credence to this, an archeological dig in Israel a few years ago found two altars in the ruins of a third-century BCE synagogue. On top of these altars were burned substances: one had the burned residue of frankincense, and the other had the burned residue of cannabis.

“So it appears that it was part and parcel of Jewish ritual to burn cannabis as incense,” Portnoy said, “and obviously in the wake of 2,000 years of diaspora, it’s something that apparently disappeared.”

Under the Jewish principle of dina d’malchuta dina, Jews are expected to follow the law of the land wherever they are. With cannabis generally illegal or taboo in Western nations, it was also not permitted for Jews. But in other parts of the world where it was a more accepted part of the culture, it was sometimes incorporated into rituals. In Morocco, for example, it was a tradition for Moroccan Jews to sprinkle hashish in the couscous for wedding parties.

And in his research, Portnoy found that Jews who actively used cannabis over the centuries tended to be located in the Middle East, where cannabis in the form of hashish was popular.

The exhibit includes a number of examples of fragmented documents from the Cairo Geniza, a collection of around 400,000 Jewish manuscript fragments from the 9th through 19th centuries. That includes a letter written in Judeo-Arabic dated from the 12th-13th centuries, addressed to Abū l-Ḥasan, asking him to purchase some hashish for the letter writer.

I will definitely be making a trip downtown to check out this exhibit in person.

Starting on May 4th, New Jersey will join New York and several other states in banning its retail stores, supermarkets, and food service businesses from handing out plastic carryout bags or polystyrene foam products.

In addition to the wider ban on plastic, New Jersey will also become the first state in the nation to prevent grocery stores from distributing paper bags. Shoppers will instead be encouraged to bring their own bags or purchase a reusable one at check-out – or else find themselves carrying out their groceries by hand.

A step in the right direction, but Gov. Murphy is also taking some steps back.

It’s no surprise that Musk disagrees with current company executives about their policymaking; he has said so from the start. Nor is it a shock that he would use his outsized platform to insult other people; it has been one his primary use cases for Twitter for years now.

But I still find myself taken aback that Musk would single out individual policy executives for this kind of public criticism now. In three to six months, if and when the deal closes, Musk is free to clean house; it has been apparent for weeks that few if any of Twitter’s current C-team will survive the transition. But to single out those executives today, while also responding sympathetically to right-wing conspiracy theorists, creates needless new turmoil at the company during an already turbulent time.

Let us count the ways. Gadde is now facing a torrent of racist abuse and death threats. Leslie Berland, the company’s chief marketing officer, came in for similar attacks this week after a recording of her reading employees’ questions aloud leaked.

And it’s not just executives: roughly a dozen Twitter employees have been doxxed by trolls in the past few days, I’m told. Sometimes it’s because they were responding to one of Musk’s tweets; other times it has been as simple as employees tweeting that they’re looking for new jobs.

At best, all of this has been a distraction for the work Twitter was doing before they were derailed by the acquisition. At worst, it’s leaving some employees fearful for their lives.

And about that issue — the actual consequences for people — the very vocal Musk has had nothing to say.

There is absolutely nothing surprising about any of this.

I want to make it very clear that I totally understand the complaints. If Apple charged me $1,600+ for a display, and had promised me a “sensational” webcam, I’d be upset too. There are 4K professional webcams out there that make Apple’s webcam look like a child’s toy.

At the same time, there is, you know, physics. If you take a 12MP image and digitally crop it to say 6MP, then view it on a 27-inch monitor, it’s not going to look as crisp as a 12MP image viewed on a smaller screen.

Now, you absolutely can turn around and say, ‘Well, in that case, Apple should have used a 24MP camera in there, and cropped it to 12MP.” Or, indeed, that it should have used the 48MP camera it is rumored to have lined up for the iPhone 14.

But there are two counterarguments to this. First, again, physics. The reality of image quality is that, once you have a halfway decent sensor and lens, the biggest thing that makes the difference is light. This is the reason why anyone who wants to look good on a Zoom presentation uses a decent-size ring light.

So even with a 48MP sensor, unless you have a decent light source, the image still isn’t going to look great in a typical office environment.

Which brings me to my second point. People are not going to use the built-in webcam – any built-in webcam – for pro work, like interviews. The type of people who do pro video work and spend $1,600+ on a monitor certainly have a decent mirrorless or DSLR camera at each end, with big ring lights. Even if you use an iPhone as your webcam, you still want a ring light for decent-quality images in a typical indoor environment.

So there’s really little point in Apple putting a more expensive webcam in there. The people who need better image quality wouldn’t use it, and for everyday video conversations, Center Stage is a more useful feature than a 48MP sensor.

Exactly. I have failed to understand the constant complaining about this webcam since the release of the Studio Display. I tested the camera and I thought it looked fine. To compare it to the iPhone sensor especially makes no sense because no Center Stage feature that introduces sensor cropping is present on that product. At the end of the day the majority of people who do use the built-in camera for FaceTime or similar needs are going to be pleased with the image quality, and professionals wouldn’t use it in the first place. This theory is further proven by the fact that the Pro Display XDR is clearly aimed at professionals, and doesn’t even have a webcam at all.

Virtual performatives (also known as the bounding asterisk construction: e.g. *jumps in excitement*, *sings myself happy birthday*) are widely used in web-based electronic written communication (instant messaging, text messaging, mobile interactive multimodal platforms, discussion boards, social networking sites and microblogging sites, see Virtanen 2020:4-5 and references); and, to a lesser extent, in comics (print as well as electronic, Zimmer 2013). While the pragmatics of the construction has attracted considerable attention (see Virtanen 2020 and references), to the best of my knowledge, no formal syntactic or semantic analysis has been offered so far. In my paper, I argue that virtual performatives are full, non-truncated clauses, and their special behaviour is due to two factors: i) their subjects are first person singular personal pronouns modified by an adjectival temporal expression and ii) they are unspecified for tense. These two factors conspire and lead to the unique characteristics of the construction: the silent subject and the split agreement phenomena. Similar constructions have been reported in other languages such as French (Dias da Silva 2015) or Polish (Lyons 2018) as well; here, I will limit the discussion to English.

This was quite an interesting take, and I fully agree with the author.

SAN FRANCISCO, April 25, 2022 /PRNewswire/ – Twitter, Inc. (NYSE: TWTR) today announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to be acquired by an entity wholly owned by Elon Musk, for $54.20 per share in cash in a transaction valued at approximately $44 billion. Upon completion of the transaction, Twitter will become a privately held company.

Under the terms of the agreement, Twitter stockholders will receive $54.20 in cash for each share of Twitter common stock that they own upon closing of the proposed transaction. The purchase price represents a 38% premium to Twitter’s closing stock price on April 1, 2022, which was the last trading day before Mr. Musk disclosed his approximately 9% stake in Twitter.

Well, that was a fun ride. Gotta love the use of disclosed rather than purchased.

Warner Bros. Discovery is shutting down CNN+ as of April 30, marking one of the company’s first significant maneuvers since completing the merger of WarnerMedia and Discovery less than two weeks ago.

The decision puts an abrupt end to an ambitious and aggressive venture that people familiar with the matter say rankled David Zaslav, the new CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery, from the start. Zaslav was annoyed by the decision of Jason Kilar, the former CEO of WarnerMedia when it was owned by AT&T, to launch CNN+ just weeks before Discovery was set to take over operations. But he was unable to communicate with WarnerMedia management, owing to legal boundaries surrounding the merger process.

“This decision is in line with WBD’s broader direct-to-consumer strategy,” said Chris Licht, the incoming CEO of CNN, in a statement. “In a complex streaming market, consumers want simplicity and an all-in service, which provides a better experience and more value than stand-alone offerings.” Zaslav has been open in the recent past about his desire to combine all of the company’s streaming-video assets, which also include Discovery+ and HBO Max, under a single umbrella.

Congratulations to CNN+ for lasting two whole Scaramuccis.

According to various reports ([1], [2], [3], [4]), GitHub is suspending accounts of Russian developers and organizations linked to or associated with organizations sanctioned by the US government over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But it appears that GitHub did not think this through entirely, because these account suspensions are fucking up my projects.

First, some brief context and background.

I recently took over as a lead maintainer for two popular projects in the Apple developer community, Quick and Nimble. I just released version 5.0 of Quick a few days ago. During the week leading up to the release, I was reviewing and merging many pull requests. But when it came time to write the release notes, I noticed very bizarre behavior. Mysteriously, some pull requests were deleted. Poof. Gone. Then I realized that an entire contributor’s presence had disappeared — all of their comments on issues were missing, all of the issues they opened were gone, all of the pull requests they opened had vanished. Every piece of activity related to the user was gone. What the fuck?!

In the same colorful language as Jesse…how the fuck did nobody at GitHub realize the negative consequences this would have to the open source community?

AVENEL, N.J. (AP) — The familiar sights and sounds are still there: the scuffed and faded floor tiles, the relentless beige-on-beige color scheme, the toddlers’ clothes and refrigerators and pretty much everything in between.

There’s even a canned recording that begins, “Attention, Kmart shoppers” — except it’s to remind folks about COVID-19 precautions, not to alert them to a flash sale over in ladies’ lingerie like days of old.

Many of the shelves are bare, though, at the Kmart in Avenel, New Jersey, picked over by bargain hunters as the store prepares to close its doors for good April 16.

Once it shutters, the number of Kmarts in the U.S. — once well over 2,000 — will be down to three in the continental U.S. and a handful of stores elsewhere, according to multiple reports, in a retail world now dominated by Walmart, Target and Amazon.

Pour one out for a real one.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk is making his “best and final” offer to buy 100 percent of Twitter in an updated 13D filed Thursday with the SEC. He’s offering $54.20 per share in cash.

Naturally, Musk had to sneak a “420” into the offer.

Musk’s wealth hovers around $260 billion, according to Bloomberg. Twitter’s market valuation is about $37 billion. Musk’s offer values Twitter at about $43 billion, according to CNBC.

Musk is offering to “acquire all of the outstanding Common Stock of the Issuer not owned by the Reporting Person for all cash consideration valuing the Common Stock at $54.20 per share.” The proposal was delivered in a letter to Twitter on April 13th. Musk says Twitter must go private to undergo changes that need to be made.

“I invested in Twitter as I believe in its potential to be the platform for free speech around the globe, and I believe free speech is a societal imperative for a functioning democracy,” said Musk in a letter sent to Twitter chairman Bret Taylor. “Twitter has extraordinary potential. I will unlock it.”

“I would need to reconsider my position as shareholder,” says Musk if his offer is not accepted.

As I said before, a lot more entertaining.

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — Should Netflix and other streaming services have to pay local governments the same fees levied on cable operators?

That was the question before the Ohio Supreme Court during a Wednesday hearing, as the court debates whether streaming services such as Netflix and Hulu are covered by a state law that would require them to pay to play.

The argument is similar to one in several other states, where cities are trying to force streaming service companies to pay cable operator fees.

At issue in Ohio is the state’s 2007 Video Service Authorization law, which directed the state Commerce Department to determine what entities must obtain permission to physically install cables and wires in a public right-of-way. Companies deemed video service providers must pay a fee to local governments under that law.

Officials with Maple Heights in suburban Cleveland contend that streaming services are subject to the fee because their content is delivered via the internet over cables and wires.

These streaming services should absolutely be required to pay these fees levied by state and local governments. If it weren’t for the broadband internet providers they wouldn’t exist. One could also argue that they are responsible for the majority of internet traffic so this just makes logical sense.

Deliveries began as a hobby—it was first released as a Dashboard widget named “Apple Order Status” on January 22, 2006. Over time more services were added, and the name and icon evolved along with it. Eventually it became an iOS app named “Delivery Status touch” on September 19, 2008, shortly after Apple first launched the App Store. When I first created the widget I never imagined I’d still be working on it daily sixteen years later.

Many things have changed over the years, and unfortunately we’re no longer able to maintain the same service that so many of you have come to rely on. Deliveries relies on many different shipping companies, and without their help it’s not possible for the app to continue working the way you expect.

It’s likely that over time, more services in Deliveries will no longer show tracking information directly in the app. You won’t see the delivery date, the map route, or any of the details, and you won’t get notifications about changes to the status. You will need to use the “View Online” button to see your tracking information on the shipping company’s web site.

We understand this will make Deliveries less useful for many of you, and you may decide to take a different approach to tracking your packages. For those of you that choose to continue using Deliveries, we’ll do our best to keep making it as useful as we’re able to. Thank you for all of your support over the years.

My first time using Deliveries was as a Dashboard widget on Mac OS X Tiger. This is definitely sad to see, and shipping companies closing off their APIs is entirely to blame.

GitHub or RubyGems

Changelog

Nokogiri published a critical security update today to address a regular expression denial-of-service vulnerability.

Updated Gems: nokogiri to 1.13.4 and public_suffix to 4.0.7

Elon Musk is no longer going to join Twitter’s board, Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal has announced in a message to the company. Last week, Agrawal confirmed that Musk would be appointed to the board following his purchase of 9.2 percent of the company’s sharesbut now says that Musk has decided against taking up the seat.

“We announced on Tuesday that Elon would be appointed to the Board contingent on a background check and formal acceptance,” Agrawal writes. “Elon’s appointment to the board was to become officially effective 4/9, but Elon shared that same day that he will no longer be joining the board. I believe this is for the best. We have and will always value input from our shareholders whether they are on our Board or not. Elon is our biggest shareholder and we will remain open to his input.”

I refrained from sharing the news last week that he would be joining the board because something just didn’t seem right. I had a vague notion it would fall apart in some way, and, well, you can’t make this stuff up. It will definitely be a lot more entertaining seeing him continue to grow his stake in the company, and influence Twitter’s decision making from the sidelines.

We all operate in different contexts. I have personal, volunteer, side-project, and corporate contexts – and different email addresses associated with each of them. The email address that I use for a specific commit tells the project in which context my contribution has been made.

So in addition to (or instead of) running setting a global configuration for your email address, you can run:

$ git config user.email yourname@company.com

within your clone of a specific repository to configure the email address that your commits should use. If you have set a global user.email as well, that’s what commits will use if you haven’t set one within a repository (git-scm documentation that describes this behavior).

This is certainly a good habit to pick up. I would add that taking the time to setup GPG keys to ensure your commits are verified is just as important too.

The power of Western agency means that they can construct words which speak exclusively to their perceived reality. The UN, EU, World Bank, IMF or any other big institution that you might think of has been leading in using the term SSA. It must be pointed out that even many governments and organizations in this region also use the term SSA without really interrogating the meaning or implied meaning of SSA. This has been useful in setting up a false dichotomy and systematic normalization of the term.

It is important to emphasize that these deeply embedded assumptions and stereotypes about Africa not only stand in the way of effectively learning about the continent, but also have been the basis of ill-conceived academic research and policies.

Six years ago the Nigerian born Chikia Onyeani of the Celebrate Africa Group argued that the term sub-Saharan Africa is demeaning to Africa and must be rejected. He rightfully argued that there is no other continent that has sub something, there is no Sub-Europe or Sub-America. We should be concerned that it’s only the people who were considered as sub human in history who are being referred to as sub-Saharan Africans. The concept of some invisible border, which divides the North of Africa from the South, is rooted in racist thought. A black and white view of African culture only serves racist generalizations. There are more serious issues to be concerned with, but we cannot exclude identity and terminology from conversations on race.

I have also used this term without really thinking much about it, or questioning its use. I see now how problematic it is and will certainly avoid it.

The Trump administration left office without providing the State Department with an accounting of the gifts former President Donald J. Trump, former Vice President Mike Pence and other White House officials received from foreign governments in 2020, the department disclosed late Friday.

The department said that as a result, it could not fully account for the gifts officials received, the latest example to emerge in recent months of how the Trump administration’s flouting of laws and norms about the day-to-day operations of government now makes it harder to determine whether anything improper took place.

“It’s flagrant and it looks terrible,” said Richard W. Painter, the former top ethics lawyer for George W. Bush’s administration. “Either it was really stupid or really corrupt.”

I guarantee it was both stupidity, and corruption.

Back on Oct. 8, 2020, when the government announced that the FBI had broken up a violent plot against a sitting governor, the case seemed like a sure thing. In addition to the men accused of kidnapping conspiracy in federal court, Michigan’s attorney general had charged eight additional individuals for providing material assistance to terrorism for their role in aiding the scheme. Months later, the Justice Department tacked on weapons of mass destruction charges, elevating it to a terrorism case as well.

But over the next 17 months, a different and more nuanced version of events began to emerge.

Defense attorneys in both the state and federal cases contended, in a series of court filings and pretrial hearings, that their clients may have been loudmouths, or even anti-government cranks, but they never actually intended to hurt anyone — and couldn’t have pulled off a kidnapping to save their own lives. Fox, the lawyers noted, was so hapless he lived in the basement of a vacuum cleaner store and was forced to go to the Mexican restaurant next door when he needed to use the bathroom. Croft, for his part, ranted about shooting down airships, cutting down every tree on the border between Ohio and Michigan, and setting off electromagnetic pulse weapons that his lawyer, Joshua Blanchard, characterized at trial as “movie stuff.”

Their statements, however nasty they might sound, were just talk, the defense said, and therefore protected by the First Amendment. To the degree that there was any actual plan to kidnap Whitmer, they added, it was the FBI that had cooked it up, while the government’s minions — as many as a dozen confidential informants — lured the defendants into half-heartedly playing along.

They said it was a case of entrapment and that they had hundreds of recordings, text messages, and Facebook posts that would shine a very different light on the government’s narrative. They included exhibits showing informants smoking cannabis with the defendants, plying them with offers of cash, and working them up into a lather with anti-government talk of their own. There was evidence of informants and FBI agents discussing ways to lure more suspects into the case, and extensive audio of defendants discussing absurd schemes involving stolen Blackhawk helicopters, 300-strong armies, and newly minted silver currencies that the defense believed showed the men were simply fantasizing.

But on Feb. 2, Judge Robert J. Jonker ruled that most of the evidence the defense hoped to present could not even be mentioned in court, let alone shown to the jury. Though the exhibits were direct audio recordings or transcriptions, just like much of the prosecution’s evidence, the judge dismissed the material as irrelevant hearsay.

He also ruled that defendants could not inquire about the past conduct of several FBI agents, though the government would be allowed to question the defendants about episodes in their own past.

What a one-sided shit show.

I want to thank whatever stars aligned that surfaced this video of the Windows 95 launch event in my algorithm. While clips from the presentation have floated around online for decades, the full 90-minute keynote has been harder to track down. Uploaded this week by the angels over at the Blue OS Museum YouTube account, the complete presentation is an absolute time capsule of technology culture as it existed on Aug. 24, 1995. It also features some incredibly cringe moments, most of which stem from Jay Leno’s cheesy and problematic joke-telling.

Quite the snapshot of a moment in time.

Designers: Can you verify that this looks like a new (wide!) font style of Apple’s “San Francisco”? 🕵️ Spotted in the WWDC2022 invitation.

Love it.

Another worrying thing about how Apple implemented custom domains for iCloud Mail is some amount of domain address and Apple ID coupling. I hold that these two should be entirely separate. If you control a domain, you’re already able to do whatever you want wrt. where any emails for that domain end up, making any arguments about security a moot point.

I have many of the same issues with iCloud as Dominic, and the biggest one for me is this ownership of an email address that has in any way been associated with an Apple ID. I was using an email address with this domain with one Apple ID and when migrating the custom domain in iCloud to a different Apple ID I was unable to recreate this existing email address. Apple support was no help and I finally bit the bullet, and decided to migrate my use of that address to a new one that I could add and use successfully.

In order to migrate my use of the old email address away from some services and various ties I temporarily switched to using Hover to host my email instead. When I did this I also found that Apple would neither successfully send to, or receive from, any email for the old address from my @icloud.com address. I tested this issue with multiple other people using their @icloud.com accounts and had the same results. Gmail, etc. had zero issues. So once a custom domain email address has been hosted with Apple it seems like it is forever locked behind their MX as far as their servers are concerned. Not a great attribute, to say the least.

In 1990, Windows 3.0 had brought plenty of improvements to Windows, but a particular weak spot was its reliance on bitmap fonts that couldn’t scale smoothly. That left an opportunity for products like Adobe Type Manager to furnish scalable PostScript fonts for desktop publishing in Windows.

To loosen Adobe’s potential stranglehold on computer fonts, Apple developed the TrueType scalable font system, and Microsoft licensed and adopted it in Windows 3.1. With a stable of built-in high-quality fonts and without the need to license fonts from Adobe, TrueType opened the door for easier desktop publishing in Windows—and also made Windows more competitive with Macs.

Microsoft licensing TrueType from Apple in this release was news to me. Funny to see them come together in an attempt to thwart Adobe back in the day.

CUPERTINO, CALIFORNIA - Apple today announced it will host its annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in an online format from June 6 through 10, free for all developers to attend. Building on the success of the past two years of virtual events, WWDC22 will showcase the latest innovations in iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS, while giving developers access to Apple engineers and technologies to learn how to create groundbreaking apps and interactive experiences.

In addition to the online conference, Apple will host a special day for developers and students at Apple Park on June 6 to watch the keynote and State of the Union videos together, along with the online community. Space will be limited, and details about how to apply to attend will be provided on the Apple Developer site and app soon.

I really hope the one day in-person event means we will see a full transition next year.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has taken a 9% stake in Twitter to become its largest shareholder after raising questions about the social media platform’s dedication to free speech.

The ultimate aim of Musk’s 73.5 million share purchase worth $2.9 billion, based on the closing price Friday, is not clear. Yet in recent weeks Musk, who has 80 million Twitter followers and posts there often, has questioned free speech on Twitter and whether the platform is undermining democracy.

The regulatory filing Monday describes Musk as a long-term investor looking to minimize his buying and selling of the shares.

He has also pondered starting a rival social media network, and industry analysts are skeptical about whether the mercurial CEO would remain on the sidelines for long.

“We would expect this passive stake as just the start of broader conversations with the Twitter board/management that could ultimately lead to an active stake and a potential more aggressive ownership role of Twitter,” Dan Ives of Wedbush Securities said in a client note early Monday.

Twitter’s stock surged 20% before the opening bell Monday.

🍿

According to information attained by the Frei Presse paper, the 61-year-old man visited several vaccination centers in the eastern German states of Saxony and Saxony-Anhalt.

The man is believed to have gotten the jab up to three times a day at different jab sites — logging 87 coronavirus vaccinations in the state of Saxony alone.

A staff member at a center in the city of Dresden grew suspicious when he recognized the man, a spokesman for the German Red Cross, Kai Kranich, told the paper.

The next time he entered a vaccination center in the town of Eilenburg, outside of Leipzig, staff called the police and he was detained.

I’ve extended James Friend’s in-browser Basilisk II port to create a full-featured classic 68K Mac in your browser. You can see it in action at system7.app or macos8.app.

This is a very impressive project, definitely read their blog post to get the backstory on putting this all together.

What the person behind the Windows account on Twitter didn’t realize is that they chose the image of someone using an iMac instead of a Windows PC.

This, of course, wouldn’t be a huge problem depending on the Mac model shown in the picture, since Intel Macs can run Windows via Boot Camp. But in this case, the image clearly shows a green M1 iMac, which can’t run Windows natively.

Right after the tweet was shared, people made fun of the image, which was still there until a few hours ago. Now Microsoft has finally deleted the tweet. It’s worth noting that Microsoft has its own lineup of computers, which includes the Surface Laptop, Surface Pro, and Surface Studio, so it’s funny to think the company chose a photo with an Apple computer.

This summarization is neither fair nor accurate. See the tweet in question below:

The tweet was published with a service called Sprinklr, and included a link to an article published on Bustle. The article was the original source of the M1 iMac image¹, and the article covers Macs as well as Windows PCs. The Sprinklr service automatically generated rich media it sourced from the article to include in the tweet. The outcome was funny, and also purely coincidental. The person responsible for managing this Twitter account for the Windows team did not choose this image at all. You could say that they should have noticed the technical issue with the image that was populated, but is that something we can assume they should know? I don’t believe that it is.

Facebook parent company Meta is paying one of the biggest Republican consulting firms in the country to orchestrate a nationwide campaign seeking to turn the public against TikTok.

The campaign includes placing op-eds and letters to the editor in major regional news outlets, promoting dubious stories about alleged TikTok trends that actually originated on Facebook, and pushing to draw political reporters and local politicians into helping take down its biggest competitor. These bare-knuckle tactics, long commonplace in the world of politics, have become increasingly noticeable within a tech industry where companies vie for cultural relevance and come at a time when Facebook is under pressure to win back young users.

Employees with the firm, Targeted Victory, worked to undermine TikTok through a nationwide media and lobbying campaign portraying the fast-growing app, owned by the Beijing-based company ByteDance, as a danger to American children and society, according to internal emails shared with The Washington Post.

Targeted Victory needs to “get the message out that while Meta is the current punching bag, TikTok is the real threat especially as a foreign owned app that is #1 in sharing data that young teens are using,” a director for the firm wrote in a February email.

Campaign operatives were also encouraged to use TikTok’s prominence as a way to deflect from Meta’s own privacy and antitrust concerns.

“Bonus point if we can fit this into a broader message that the current bills/proposals aren’t where [state attorneys general] or members of Congress should be focused,” a Targeted Victory staffer wrote.

This really clarifies the extent to which Meta will employ opposition-research tactics. No level of low is too low for this shitty company.

Around 16 per cent of British toddlers aged three and four use TikTok, a report by Ofcom has revealed.

Despite the app being limited for use by those aged 13 or older, the report found that a growing number of children are regularly using TikTok – including almost one third of children aged five to seven-years-old.

For kids aged between eight and 11, TikTok was the most popular social media platform with one in every three people in the age group having an account, closely followed by YouTube at 27 per cent.

How exactly was surveying conducted in order to gather these statistics? Maybe they should have attempted to tie the findings to some clear analysis of facts.

We learned last month that the Jan. 6 committee found gaps in the White House call logs on the day of the Capitol riot, as well as that those gaps include times the committee knows former President Trump was on the phone. We learned on Tuesday that those “gaps” were more like one huge gap that spans … just about the entire day.

The Washington Post and CBS News have reported that the logs turned over to the committee show a gap in Trump’s phone logs that spans seven hours and thirty-seven minutes, a period of time that includes that attack on the Capitol. The Jan. 6 committee has been intensely interested in Trump’s communications as the attack was unfolding, and is now investigating a “possibly coverup,” according to a member who spoke to the Post.

The dark period begins at 11:17 a.m. and ends at 6:54 p.m. Trump was very much on the phone during this period, during which a mob including his supporters violently stormed the Capitol in an attempt to stop the certification of the 2020 election results, but the White House made no record of these calls — or it did and they’re missing. The records do show Trump making calls before 11:17 in the morning — including to Rudy Giuliani and Steve Bannon — and after 6:54 in the evening, including another call to Bannon.

Trump’s attitude in public was deplorable enough, but it seems the truly heinous behavior happened in the shadows.

It all started in 2005, when Patriots owner Robert Kraft was in Russia with Sandy Weill, a friend who was the president of Citi group at the time of the trip. Kraft had just received his ring for the Pats’ win in Super Bowl XXXIX, so he decided to show the ring to Weill.

After seeing it, Weill had what turned out to be a horrible idea: “Show the ring to Putin.”

Way more than a horrible idea…

“I took out the ring and showed it to [Putin], and he put it on and he goes, ‘I can kill someone with this ring,’” Kraft said in 2013. “I put my hand out and he put it in his pocket, and three KGB guys got around him and walked out.”

Despite the fact that Putin walked off with the ring, Kraft still wanted the $25,000 piece of jewelry returned. However, he ended up giving up on his quest to get the ring back when White House called and told Kraft that starting World War III over a Super Bowl ring probably wouldn’t be the best idea.

“It would really be in the best interest of US-Soviet relations if you meant to give the ring as a present,” Kraft said he was told on the White House call in 2005. “I really didn’t [want to]. I had an emotional tie to the ring, it has my name on it. I don’t want to see it on eBay. There was a pause on the other end of the line, and the voice repeated, ‘It would really be in the best interest if you meant to give the ring as a present.’”

Craziness.

CUPERTINO, CALIFORNIA Apple tonight made history after “CODA” landed three Academy Awards from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, with wins for Best Picture, Best Supporting Actor for Troy Kotsur, and Best Adapted Screenplay for Siân Heder. The winners were revealed this evening at the 94th Annual Academy Awards ceremony in Los Angeles.

“CODA” is the first motion picture starring a predominantly Deaf cast in leading roles to win Best Picture; Troy Kotsur is the first Deaf male actor to win Best Supporting Actor; and writer-director Siân Heder earned her first-ever Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.

The first streaming service to win Best Picture. Having only been in the streaming game for two years this is one hell of an accomplishment.

GitHub or RubyGems

Changelog

This update is simply bumping quattle.gem to require Ruby 2.7.0 or later. A necessary change in order to support an upcoming feature addition.

GitHub or RubyGems

Changelog

Updated Gems: concurrent-ruby from 1.1.9 to 1.1.10¹ and kramdown from 2.3.1 to 2.3.2

Stephen Wilhite, one of the lead inventors of the GIF, died last week from COVID at the age of 74, according to his wife, Kathaleen, who spoke to The Verge. He was surrounded by family when he passed. His obituary page notes that “even with all his accomplishments, he remained a very humble, kind, and good man.”

Stephen Wilhite worked on GIF, or Graphics Interchange Format, which is now used for reactions, messages, and jokes, while employed at CompuServe in the 1980s. He retired around the early 2000s and spent his time traveling, camping, and building model trains in his basement.

Although GIFs are synonymous with animated internet memes these days, that wasn’t the reason Wilhite created the format. CompuServe introduced them in the late 1980s as a way to distribute “high-quality, high-resolution graphics” in color at a time when internet speeds were glacial compared to what they are today. “He invented GIF all by himself — he actually did that at home and brought it into work after he perfected it,” Kathaleen said. “He would figure out everything privately in his head and then go to town programming it on the computer.”

If you want to go more in-depth into the history of the GIF, the Daily Dot has a good explainer of how the format became an internet phenomenon.

While there have been long-standing debates about the correct pronunciation of the image format, Wilhite was very clear on how he intended for it to be said. In 2013, he told The New York Times, “The Oxford English Dictionary accepts both pronunciations. They are wrong. It is a soft ‘G,’ pronounced ‘jif.’ End of story.”

The latest app update has removed the option to rent and purchase movies on Android TV and Google TV devices. The two buttons have been replaced by a new ‘How to Watch’ button which states: “You can buy, rent or subscribe in the Apple TV app on iPhone, iPad, and other streaming devices.”

Apple added a button to refer users to an external source to purchase the content. Seriously? Sure, Google allows this, but it sure as hell isn’t a good look considering the stance Apple has taken in not allowing the same on their own platform. Definitely a stupid, unforced error on their part.

SystemSix is a desk calendar that displays the weather forecast and phase of the moon on an e-ink display. This is a kind of love-letter to my first Macintosh.

It’s powered by a Raspberry Pi 3. The display is 5.83” e-ink display from Waveshare.

• If you configure it to point to a public calendar it will fetch the next six calendar events and display them (see below, the events are the folder names in the window in “list view”).

• Configure your latitude and longitude in the settings and it will fetch the local weather forecast (see below, being displayed in the Scrapbook).

• In the evening SystemSix displays the current phase of the moon (see below, looking like a “desk accessory” in vintage-Mac parlance).

• The trash icon is displayed “full” on the day of your choice (for me it’s Monday, to remind me to take the trash to the curb for Tuesday pickup).

I definitely feel quite a bit of nostalgia from this project.

There’s just one caveat: the M1 Ultra is only available in the Mac Studio. You can’t buy one off the shelf and slap it into any old computer. That’s a major letdown for enthusiasts who build their computers.

According to Ives, however, Apple may eventually make the M1 Ultra available to other computer makers, giving consumers the ability to build their own M1 Ultra-based systems while putting Apple in direct competition with Intel, AMD, and Nvidia.

“This latest M1 Ultra is a game changer on the graphics front and ultimately is competitive versus Nvidia,” Ives said. “Now it’s about how big Apple goes outside Cupertino and selling its chip to third parties.”

Of course, Apple could simply hold on to its chips and use them to lure prospective customers. After all, it’s done that with the iPhone for years. Apple also previously licensed its Mac OS operating to third parties in the ’90s, but killed the program, because it was cannibalizing its own Macintosh computer sales.

Apple could hold on to its chips? Yeah, no shit. That is exactly what they are going to do. The reasoning for which is literally spelled out in this quote. They licensed macOS in the ’90s and halted it because ultimately they were screwing themselves. Apple doesn’t desire to be a chip foundry for the whole industry. They cannot stop mentioning how much better their silicon is compared to other companies, and there will remain a single way to take advantage of it: buy a Mac.

So if we adopt permanent DST, we’re adopting a schedule where we get more light during the hours most people call night, and much less light in the hours we consider morning. We’re setting ourselves up to fall into the delay region sand trap: More light in the night, making us stay up later and get delayed, and far less light in the AM hours to counteract it.

This is what tanked permanent DST the first time we tried it. I’m not sure why this doesn’t always get brought up as the very first point against permanent DST, but we’ve totally done it before. In 1973, anywhere from 57-73% of people supported staying on DST during the winter. So they did it, in January of 1974. By the time February and March rolled around, only 19-30% of people still thought it was a good idea, while 43% said it was actively bad.

What changed? People experienced what happens to your body when you have to kick off your day in the dark of night. They drove to work and caught the bus to school, while the sun waited to rise until 8:00 am. They didn’t like it, and rolled the decision back before the next winter came around.

I hope members of the House read this article from last November before following the Senate.

When I started CSS-Tricks in 2007, I couldn’t have imagined how much it would grow. I wanted it to grow, that was the plan, but now it’s a far bigger job than any one person can do. That, I was never ready for.

Let me take a quick moment to give some thanks here. I had the incredible help of Geoff as lead editor, sponsor wrangler, and site manager. Robin turned the newsletter into the must-read industry rag it is now. It’s a family business as well! My wife Miranda helped with the books, working with authors, and her guidance on running the site as a proper publication has led the site where it is. I literally couldn’t have done it without any one of them. And of course, the incredible group of authors, with a special shout out to Sarah, a long-time staff writer and friend.

A small but mighty team, indeed. And that’s the thing. CSS-Tricks deserves more human muscle behind it than I’ve been able to provide for it. That’s where DigitalOcean comes in. That’s the “why now.” They have the resources to put behind CSS-Tricks, and the motivation to do so. I fully trust them to do it, as they’ve been successfully doing it themselves for a long time.

I have been utilizing CSS-Tricks for almost fifteen years now, hard to believe. Couldn’t be happier for Chris, and the whole team over there. They built one hell of a resource, and I think it will be in good hands.

From the jump, Apple made it clear who the Mac Studio and Studio Display were for. It showed them being used by musicians, 3D artists, and developers in its presentation, and the message was clear: these are products for creative professionals or people who aspire to be creative professionals. You know, the same exact crowd it’s targeted with MacBook Pro commercials for years.

“My first thought was, ‘Oh, I wonder when the iPhone Studio comes out,” says Jonathan Balck, co-founder and managing director of ad agency Colossus, in an interview with The Verge. “Pro was exclusive, and it was about one way of doing things, but the whole culture is moving toward creativity,” he adds while musing whether we could see Apple’s Pro branding shift to become Studio branding instead.

I can hear people asking: “Isn’t it a bit early to predict that, given that we’ve only seen two products?” It’s a very fair question. But it definitely seems like a first step — to me, the Mac Studio line is a clear successor to Apple’s iMac Pro. Both computers are powered by monstrous CPUs and come standard with 10Gb Ethernet and a healthy crop of Thunderbolt and USB ports. I’m convinced that, had Apple released the new Studio even two years ago, it would’ve put “Pro” in the name. (Though, to play devil’s advocate, I’m not as sure it would’ve done so for the Studio Display.)

I disagree entirely with the notion that the Studio name is some sort of introduction to a new branding strategy by Apple. It takes so many design cues from the Mac mini that if Studio were in fact going to become a new adjective appended to product names it would have started already. I agree that Pro has been overused, and doesn’t carry much significance for products like AirPods Pro but the same can be said for the word Studio. What would become of the near future redesign of the Mac Pro? They obviously can’t call it Mac Studio. iPhone Studio doesn’t make any sense, nor does iPad Studio. No, I believe Pro is here to stay for the foreseeable future. Studio is the name of the product because it’s fitting for the niche which it serves, simple as that.

Though I wouldn’t be surprised if a revision to the Pro Display XDR adopted this display naming scheme, and takes the name Studio Display XDR. Apple has already shown a willingness to share this terminology across the 12.9” iPad Pro, and the 2021 14” and 16” MacBook Pros because of the underlying tech that warrants the XDR branding.

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Changelog

A quick update to ensure compatibility with the latest release of Jekyll.

Updated Gems: jekyll to 4.2.2 and jekyll-sass-converter to 2.2.0

Olha Koba, a psychologist in Kyiv, said that “anger and hate in this situation is a normal reaction and important to validate.” But it is important to channel it into something useful, she said, such as making incendiary bombs out of empty bottles.

I love the realism of this quote, and that The Times chose to publish it.

We go deep on every platform where Chrome runs to provide the fastest possible experience. We’re excited to announce that in M99, Chrome on Mac has achieved the highest score to date of any browser – 300 – in Apple’s Speedometer browser responsiveness benchmark.

Building on many performance changes over the last year, we enabled ThinLTO in M99, a build optimization technique that inlines speed-critical parts of the code base, even when they span multiple files or libraries. The result? An additional across-the-board speed bump that makes Chrome 7% faster than current builds of Safari. Combined with recent graphics optimizations (namely, pass-through decoder and out-of-process rasterization), our tests have also shown Chrome’s graphics performance to be 15% faster than Safari. Overall, since launching Chrome on M1-based Macs in late 2020, Chrome is now 43% faster than it was just 17 months ago!

Noticeably absent from this blog post; any mention of the amount of RAM gobbled up or the major hit to battery life in comparison to Safari. Wonder why?

This is all very inside-baseball, but frankly, if you’re reading an article titled, “Do Journalists Need Be Brands?” you’re the kind of person already has strong opinions on the topic and knows who both Haberman and Lorenz are, so I’m just going to unapologetically lean into media navel-gazing here. And I’m going to take a side: I believe Lorenz is correct, and Haberman’s repulsion by this idea is partly a function of the fact that despite having a high-profile book deal and a constant stream of TV appearances, she believes that she is not branding herself, and that her work is just doing all of this on its own. She also has no idea what it’s like to face the kind of job insecurity people Lorenz’s age do, and barring some Jayson Blair-level scandal will never ever be fired or laid off by the Times. She is also well paid, which is not true of everyone who works at the Times, especially on the editorial side.

This is also a function of how both of them got to the Times in the first place and how they view their own successes. Haberman’s father is legendary Times journalist Clyde Haberman, and her mother is a high profile PR person who is well connected in media herself. Haberman is an award winning journalist whose abilities might be extraordinary, but we don’t know if her trajectory would have been different if she had to knock on the front door with an unsolicited resume — and neither does she.

Lorenz did not grow up without privilege (Greenwich, Connecticut is not Slapout, Alabama¹) but she moved into journalism from a digital background that wasn’t journalism, and does not have the typical trajectory of a Times journalist, or the Ivy League credentials they say are not important but they absolutely pay attention to. Ergo, Lorenz was regarded as a bit of an outsider internally, and some people tend to be dismissive of young women who cover beats they regard as lesser.

In total agreement with Elizabeth’s take on this one. If anyone needs to “sit down” it’s Haberman. How is there even a question in the year 2022 whether or not journalists need to brand themselves? Of course they do.

Apple’s Maps and Weather apps now mark Crimea as part of Ukraine when accessed outside of Russia. It appears the company has quietly updated its stance on the territorial dispute. Russia’s recent invasion of Ukraine may have something to do with it.

Previously, Apple’s apps tried to sidestep the issue by refusing to record Crimea as part of any country when accessed in most places. However, in 2019 Apple updated its Maps and Weather apps to show Crimea as part of Russia when viewed within Russia, defying international consensus and angering Ukrainians.

Ten years after we founded it, The Verge continues to be the best place to discover the import and impact of technology’s place in our culture — but after today, the team will be doing that without me. After 20 years in media, I’ve decided it’s time to do something new. If you’ve been a Vergecast listener, you know that disclosure is our brand, so here’s mine: I’m headed to Google to work on the Platforms & Ecosystems team. I am excited to help shape the future of software platforms like Android and Chrome — and continue to work at the nexus of technology and culture, just in a different way.

He has been a reliable source for detailed coverage of the technology industry for as long as I can remember. Best of luck! 🥂

Abramovich is perhaps the most visible of the “oligarchs” surrounding Putin, who are widely perceived as extensions of the Russian president and keepers of a vast fortune that is effectively under the Kremlin’s control. Much of this wealth was extracted from Russia’s enormous energy and mineral resources, and is now stashed in secret bank accounts in the Mediterranean and the Caribbean, in empty mansions and condos from London to Manhattan to Miami, and in yachts and private jets on the French Riviera. A 2017 paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research estimated that as much as 60% of Russia’s GDP is offshore—which would amount to roughly a trillion dollars outside the country. As Russian forces bombard Ukraine’s cities, the United States and its allies are mobilizing to seize the oligarchs’ overseas assets as a way to isolate and undermine Putin’s government. “Putin views the money in the hands of so-called oligarchs close to the Kremlin as really his money, which can be deployed—and often has been—to pursue interests abroad,” said Ben Judah, a British journalist and author who has written extensively about Putin’s kleptocracy. “Dismantling this network of Kremlin wealth across the West is dismantling a system to advance Putin’s interests.”

Though calls to sanction the oligarchs are escalating, they preceded Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In January 2021, for example, the Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny put Abramovich at the top of a list of eight Russian business and political elites who he thinks should be sanctioned by Western governments, calling him “one of the key enablers and beneficiaries of Russian kleptocracy.” (Shortly thereafter, Navalny returned to Russia and faced immediate arrest, and he remains in prison more than a year later.) Navalny’s call is now being echoed by some of the most powerful people on earth. In his State of the Union address on Tuesday, President Joe Biden called out the oligarchs directly. “Tonight, I say to the Russian oligarchs and corrupt leaders who built billions of dollars off this violent regime, no more,” said Biden to bipartisan applause. “The United States Department of Justice is assembling a dedicated task force to go after the crimes of the Russian oligarchs. We are joining with European allies to find and seize their yachts, their luxury apartments, their private jets. We are coming for you.”

The key takeaway being Putin laying claim to his close allies’ money to fund deplorable acts of violence.

I want to give Jewish Currents the props they are due for choosing to exercise good permalink structure.

GitHub or RubyGems

Changelog

Just wanted to push out another small update with some minor changes to clean up the display of permalinks, post meta data, and author attribution.

Changelog for previous release of v1.5.0

Added: $variables for headers, header-before, and inline code borders

Added: meta properties and manifest.json so that the website will now function as a progressive web app

Improved: the Atom feed to RSS 2.0. A separate links.xml file is included that will only display posts that include link: front matter

Improved: further refinements to blockquotes, lead (lede), post meta info

Changed: root font size and line height to be slightly larger

Changed: default font for Windows to Noto Sans

It’s official — Apple’s doing a product launch event on Tuesday, March 8. The company sent out invitations bearing the phrase “Peek performance,” a Dad-Joke-level play on words that frustrated humorless editors and sticklers everywhere.

Now begins the reading of the tea leaves. While I usually try not to give myself a pareidolia headache by staring at Apple artwork and asking “what does it all mean, maaaaan?”, in this case I think it’s worth mulling things over a little bit.

It’s all about that second word—performance. Ever since Apple started including its own chip designs in Macs, Apple has—rightfully—promoted the power and promise of those chips heavily. Since new iPhone-class processors only really appear in the fall, this has to be a reference to Macs running Apple silicon.

The event title does indicate the Mac seeing some love, and I would expect the larger iMac to get a redesign. I also expect a “peek” at the rumored AR/VR product because the logo on the events page is itself an augmented reality experience.

GitHub or RubyGems

Changelog

Added: $variables for headers, header-before, and inline code borders

Added: meta properties and manifest.json so that the website will now function as a progressive web app

Improved: the Atom feed to RSS 2.0. A separate links.xml file is included that will only display posts that include link: front matter

Improved: further refinements to blockquotes, lead (lede), post meta info

Changed: root font size and line height to be slightly larger

Changed: default font for Windows to Noto Sans

Often misattributed to Steve Jobs, the poem was a part of Apple’s iconic Think Different ad campaign developed in the late 90s. Back then, Apple’s image in the computing space was that Macintosh’s were computers for ‘creatives,’ more toy than tool. Rather than try to wipe away that reputation, Apple leaned in and fully embraced it. The ad campaign highlighted how the creatives - those who see things differently - were, in fact, those who change the world—featuring iconic individuals including Einstein, Gandhi, Amelia Earhart, Mohammad Ali, and more. It was brilliant! Everything about the campaign branded Apple as mavericks and distinctly different from the competition. It was an evocative campaign that painted Apple as the scrappy underdog. It certainly was, and still arguably is, a philosophy that continues to be infused in the company’s DNA despite its phenomenal success and market dominance.

The poem itself was developed by a collective including Rob Siltanen, Lee Clow, and others. It was allegedly initially ‘hated’ by Steve Jobs, although he later came around & changed his mind (classic Steve). Two narrations of the ad exist, one by Richard Dreyfuss and one by Steve Jobs himself.

Though the Think Different campaign ended in the early 2000s, the poem has continued to find its way into various Apple icons as recently as 2020. Here’s a small collection of where the verse has popped up in Apple’s icon history.

This is a really fun piece. I had noticed quite a few of these instances over the years, but had no idea the Notes app had the poem embedded as short hand in its icon. Nor had I realized just how many emoji included it as well. Watch both versions of the marketing video too if you haven’t done so already.

Donald Trump’s media group released its TRUTH Social iOS app today in the U.S., but a scan of the app’s API using publicly available tools revealed that it already closed itself to registrations (also, the scan showed that its “proprietary account registration microservice” is named “Pepe,” which is also the name of a meme with racist connotations).

I signed up for an account and the app reported that I am number 49,763 on the waitlist. An hour later I receive an email stating that I am number 129,763. So something is royally screwed up on their backend. Obviously I have no intention of making regular use of a trash community like this, but I was curious to see who starts using it as a platform and what the tone is like.

Can we talk, briefly, about the URLs on your blog?

If you’re like most people, your permalinks (the permanent links to individual posts) probably look like this:

yourdomain.com/2015/02/24/title-of-post

We’re all familiar with those URLs. The date of the post is explicit, so you need never wonder when it was written, or how recent it is.

Here’s the thing, though: they’re horrible.

Many of the reasons laid out in his post echo my own reasoning for doing the same for this site. I don’t even display the date a post was published on my front page. If readers really want to know this information it is shown on each individual post and as an available sorting option in the archive.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Feb. 15, 2022 – Akamai Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ: AKAM), the world’s most trusted solution to power and protect digital experiences, today announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Linode, one of the easiest-to-use and most trusted infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platform providers.

Modern digital experiences, including virtual environments like the metaverse, are created through the convergence of media, entertainment, technology, ecommerce, financial services, and online games. Akamai has been a key partner to the world’s leaders in these industries for decades by powering and protecting applications in today’s multi-cloud, multi-platform world. Together with Linode, which has made it simple, affordable and accessible for developers to consume cloud computing, Akamai will become the world’s most distributed compute platform, from cloud to edge.

“The opportunity to combine Linode’s developer-friendly cloud computing capabilities with Akamai’s market-leading edge platform and security services is transformational for Akamai,” said Dr. Tom Leighton, chief executive officer and co-founder, Akamai Technologies. “Akamai has been a pioneer in the edge computing business for over 20 years, and today we are excited to begin a new chapter in our evolution by creating a unique cloud platform to build, run and secure applications from the cloud to the edge. This a big win for developers who will now be able to build applications on a platform that delivers unprecedented scale, reach, performance, reliability and security.​”

Christopher Aker, founder and chief executive officer, Linode, added, “We started Linode 19 years ago to make the power of the cloud easier and more accessible. Along the way, we built a cloud computing platform trusted by developers and businesses around the world. Today, those customers face new challenges as cloud services become all-encompassing, including compute, storage, security and delivery from core to edge. Solving those challenges requires tremendous integration and scale which Akamai and Linode plan to bring together under one roof. This marks an exciting new chapter for Linode and a major step forward for our current and future customers.”

Under terms of the agreement, Akamai has agreed to acquire all of the outstanding equity of Linode Limited Liability Company for approximately $900 million, after customary purchase price adjustments. As a result of structuring the transaction as an asset purchase, Akamai expects to achieve cash income tax savings over the next 15 years that have an estimated net present value of approximately $120 million. The transaction is expected to close in the first quarter of 2022 and is subject to customary closing conditions.

I have been a Linode customer for years now and am highly worried Akamai is going to change so much about the service it becomes unrecognizable. This happened at my previously favored provider WebFaction who was acquired by GoDaddy. I don’t like this at all.

Democratic Gov. Steve Sisolak announced that the state no longer required face coverings in most places, “effective immediately.”

But to avoid having students rip off their masks in class, he said rules for schools remained in place until the end of the day.

“Masks are not required for students and teachers and employees beginning tomorrow morning,” the governor said.

The Nevada Gaming Control Board quickly followed with an order lifting the face covering rule for casinos “unless a local jurisdiction still imposes such a requirement.”

“I want to be clear, the emergency is not over,” Sisolak said. “The pandemic is not over. We’re still getting far too many cases, far too many hospitalizations and far too many deaths.”

“I’m hopeful and confident, based on the data we have, we are in a good positions to drop this and to give people back some freedom. Everyone wants to get back to their normal life … I mean, its been two years. I think the time has come,” he said.

Stating that the pandemic is not over while removing restrictions statewide. That really says it all.

Coinbase just made its Super Bowl debut with a remarkable clever QR code ad that might have been too popular: the company’s “Less talk, more Bitcoin,” campaign appears to have temporarily knocked out its app following the ad airing during the broadcast.

The full 60-second ad almost entirely consisted of a colorful bouncing QR code, reminiscent of the iconic bouncing DVD logo meme. When scanned, the code brought viewers to Coinbase’s promotional website, offering a limited time promotion of $15 worth of free Bitcoin to new sign ups, along with a $3 million giveaway that customers can enter.

Alex Lindsay had the perfect take:

The Coinbase Super Bowl ad was a perfect example of Function over Form. It will not win awards for the agency, it was not very pleasing to look at…

It did produce incredible results. The app went from 186 to number 2 on the app store.

We can all learn something from that.

A Missouri prosecutor won’t charge a St. Louis Post-Dispatch journalist whom Gov. Mike Parson targeted for a criminal investigation after he revealed a data flaw in a state website that left 100,000 teachers’ Social Security numbers vulnerable.

Josh Renaud, the journalist who was targeted:

This decision is a relief. But it does not repair the harm done to me and my family.

My actions were entirely legal and consistent with established journalistic principles.

Yet Gov. Mike Parson falsely accused me of being a “hacker” in a televised press conference, in press releases sent to every teacher across the state, and in attack ads aired by his political action committee. He ordered the Highway Patrol to begin a criminal investigation, forcing me to keep silent for four anxious months.

This was a political persecution of a journalist, plain and simple.

Horrible treatment of the journalist aside, the entire case being hinged on viewing page source is so stupid it’s laughable. A perfect example of why the current minds in government aren’t equipped to regulate the tech industry. The only blame to place in this instance is with the web developers who left sensitive data exposed. This could only have been worse if the social security numbers were publicly displayed on the site.

Harry McCracken, a technology editor at FastCompany, made the most hackneyed defense of the metaverse yet - the suggestion that the rejection (was there a rejection?) of mobile phones in 1994 and the success of the iPhone about some 13 years later is some proof point for the metaverse.

The problem with this logic - as common as it is - is that it conflates “Steve Jobs took big swings with the iPad and iPhone” with “sometimes we just have to trust CEOs that are spending billions of dollars on nothing.” Jobs was not pushing something that didn’t exist; he was simply taking a form factor of something we had on us a lot - our phone and our MP3 player or walkman - and combining it into a more consumer-friendly format. The user experience on the iPhone was innovative and, specifically, a breath of fresh air in a cellphone industry that felt several leagues behind personal computing.

What Jobs was not selling us was a new and foreign concept. We might have had to relearn how we did certain things, but we were not learning new things to do - we were making phone calls, listening to music, and browsing the web. These were all things we did before, done on a new device, in a new way, pitched to us by a charming sociopath. The “new” thing was the idea of a persistent, portable internet connection that was remotely affordable for consumers. While Jobs challenged us to think differently, he didn’t have to spend multiple interviews explaining what the hell an iPhone did.

Another thing Jobs didn’t do was massively misrepresent what a product could do or promise impossible things.

The only portion of the quoted text that is remotely true is the last sentence. Mark Zuckerberg is a liar, absolutely. I agree with the thesis of the article that everything about the man is lies, but the idea that the metaverse isn’t a real thing is totally idiotic. People have been hanging out online in virtual spaces and communities for a very long time. Zuckerberg sees the giant ship that is Facebook slowly sinking and wants desperately to be the iPhone of those online communities. The idea is neither new nor a foreign concept.

I’ve read some weak job applications in my time (and written a few myself), but this piece of rubbish was surely destined for the dustbin. This application is more than underwhelming—it is a monument to half-assery, an epic, cosmic, fail.

Which is exactly what I love about it.

But in 1973, Steve was barely 18 years old. He didn’t know his purpose yet. The future titan of industry was a restless, barefoot wanderer who was into calligraphy, Dylan, Shakespeare, electronics, and dance. He was reading Buddhism in the library, scrounging in Commons, and making little blue boxes to cheat the phone company. These were important, even life-changing experiences, but they didn’t qualify him for a job—and no amount of résumé-polishing could disguise that fact. He was still growing, still exploring, still foolish.

I wish everyone could taste the excitement, the intensity that lies at the heart of true education, whether it takes place reading Plato’s Republic on the Great Lawn or wrestling with Zen koans on a TriMet bus. I wish everyone could have the time and space to kindle the spark of inspiration into a fire. And when it comes to reading—and writing—job applications, I wish everyone could remember that we, too, are unfinished projects, first drafts, rough cuts, works in progress. The main difference is that some of us have been going at it longer than others.

I love Steve’s answer on the application as to whether he has access to transportation, “possible but not probobale”.

In 1982, Microsoft hired a new marketing VP named Rowland Hanson, who was a veteran of the cosmetics industry. Hanson brought a new angle for defining Microsoft’s brand that involved placing the “Microsoft” name in front of its products with a generic or simple word after it, such as Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel.

While researching a new name for Interface Manager, Hanson reviewed trade articles about this wave of PC multitasking systems and pointed out what they had in common. He noticed the term “window” used a lot in the context of terms like “windowing system” and “windowing manager,” so he latched onto “Windows” as a generic term that would help Microsoft own the entire product category. Every time someone referred to windowing systems from then on, they would tangentially be promoting the “Windows” brand.

It’s interesting how popular single word, simple descriptions for company and product names are today (Block, Meta, etc.) but Windows set the trend all the way back in 1985. This is a fun look back at how it all came into fruition.

Chance Miller reporting for 9to5Mac:

Pretend to be shocked: Apple has been slapped with another fine of five million euros by the Authority for Consumers and Markets in the Netherlands. This comes after the Dutch watchdog took issue with Apple’s proposed plans for third-party App Store payments, and Apple has not yet addressed the regulator’s concerns.

The ACM is holding true to its plans to charge Apple a five million euro fine every week after Apple missed a January 15 deadline to address antitrust concerns around the App Store. This marks the third weekly fine so far, each one equal to five million euros or roughly $5.72 million, as reported by Reuters.

The regulatory pressure in the Netherlands centers on dating applications in the App Store. The Dutch watchdog ordered Apple to allow developers of dating applications in the Netherlands to use alternative payment systems. While Apple announced its plans to comply with these demands, the ACM didn’t find Apple’s announcement to be satisfactory.

Apple is intentionally making this difficult for developers to implement which is the actual bad acting aspect of this policy. The 27% number was shocking at first but when you consider Google’s similar actions with regard to South Korea in November of last year it isn’t actually that surprising. Should the ACM levy this fine against Apple on a weekly basis until they deem their implementations as full compliance? No. Apple is a slow moving ship and changes like this take time, the weekly fines are only going to sour the wine further.

Consistent with the ACM’s order, dating apps that are granted an entitlement to link out or use a third-party in-app payment provider will pay Apple a commission on transactions. Apple will charge a 27% commission on the price paid by the user, net of value-added taxes. This is a reduced rate that excludes value related to payment processing and related activities. Developers will be responsible for the collection and remittance of any applicable taxes, such as the Netherlands’ value-added tax (VAT), for sales processed by a third-party payment provider.

Nobody guessed that Apple wouldn’t still seek a commission on sales completed with outside payment providers, but I think 27% caught a lot of people by surprise. These apps are also unable to utilize in-app purchases which I would assume is where the bulk of sales originate from. Currently Apple lowers their commission for subscriptions after the first year from 30% to 15% but makes absolutely no mention of this for third-party payments. I suppose the right way to interpret this is; stick to using our payment processing, or be faced with making less money overall in the long run.

Benjamin Mayo sums this up perfectly:

Apple is doing everything they can to toe the line to comply with the Netherlands ruling on alternate payment systems for dating apps. I’m not sure you could find a webpage more emblematic of the idiom of following the letter of the law, rather than the spirit of the law. They are also simultaneously appealing the decision and that tone comes across in the text too, as if each sentence is dripping with resentment.

I can only assume this is just the first bout in many rounds of back-and-forth over terms, that will be replicated and reproduced on a global scale eventually. This court ruling is on enabling competition for in-app payment systems, rather than the general monopoly of mobile app stores. However, the two are obviously inextricably linked. No one is going to use a third-party payment system when the saving compared to Apple’s built-in offering is a measly 3%. These current terms will not incite competition in payment systems as no developer will ever implement one. If you think the 3% will just about cover independent credit card processing fees, the customer acquisition costs and additional support overhead alone will make it an unprofitable course of action.

Apple is constantly making the case against allowing side-loading apps, but in the same breath issues a policy like this one which very much makes the case in favor of allowing it. As stated by Mayo, this court ruling is on enabling competition for payment systems and as can be clearly seen this does not pave the way for that happening at all. I cannot wait to see how the courts respond to this laughable policy.

The price of shares in Meta – the parent company of Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Meta Quest (fka Oculus) – dropped more than 25 percent at the start of trading on Thursday, after it revealed its first-ever sequential decline in Facebook’s daily active users . By the time the markets closed, the company had seen $230 billion in market value wiped out, the biggest one-day loss ever by a US company.

A well-deserved outcome.

A series of new remarks by Donald J. Trump about the aftermath of the 2020 election and new disclosures about his actions in trying to forestall its result – including discussing the use of the national security apparatus to seize voting machines – have stripped away any pretense that the events of Jan. 6, 2021, were anything but the culmination of the former president’s single-minded pursuit of retaining power.

Mr. Trump said on Sunday that Mike Pence “could have overturned the election,” acknowledging for the first time that the aim of the pressure campaign he focused on his vice president had simply been to change the election’s result, not just to buy time to root out supposed fraud, as he had long insisted. Those efforts ended at the Capitol with a violent riot of Trump supporters demanding that Mr. Pence block the Electoral College vote.

Over the weekend, Mr. Trump also dangled, for the first time, that he could issue pardons to anyone facing charges for participating in the Jan. 6 attack if he is elected president again – the latest example of a yearslong flirtation with political violence.

And, ignoring what happened the last time he encouraged a mass demonstration, Mr. Trump urged his supporters to gather “in the biggest protests we have ever had” if prosecutors in New York and Atlanta moved further against him. The prosecutor examining Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the election in Georgia immediately asked the F.B.I. to conduct a “risk assessment” of her building’s security.

One hell of a lede on this piece.

App Library is more useful on every new version as the Home Screen is now a place for widgets and for placing different icons based on different Focus settings. PWAs are still hidden from App Library’s folders. They appear in App Library’s Search, making a UX problem (they exist and do not exist simultaneously, in the same section).

The iOS Simulator renders the PWA icons in a “WebClips” category to make things even weirder. But this category doesn’t exist on the actual device, which makes me think someone removed it explicitly from the devices.

How on earth is this still an issue?

A new study has identified cannabis compounds as a therapeutic agent to prevent coronavirus infections by blocking the virus from entering human cells. According to the study’s authors, widespread use of these compounds from pot plants and a vaccination regime could help to fight the virus’s spread and the disease it causes in people who get infected.

“With widespread use of cannabinoids, resistant variants could still arise, but the combination of vaccination and CBDA/CBGA treatment should create a more challenging environment with which SARS-CoV-2 must contend, reducing the likelihood of escape,” the study’s authors write.

As detailed in a new study published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Natural Products by researchers from Oregon State University and Oregon Health & Sciences University, the scientists were looking for a biological compound that could bind with the spike protein of the SARS-COV-2 virus, which causes COVID-19. Using a technique called affinity-selection mass spectrometry (used to quickly assess a large volume of compounds) on cannabis, the researchers honed in on three compounds: cannabigerolic acid, or CBG-A; tetrahydrocannabinolic acid, or THC-A; and cannabidiolic acid, or CBD-A. Sadly, since THC-A is a controlled substance, they couldn’t get enough of the stuff to assess its effects and focused on the others.

Imagine the medical advancements we could see if the federal government would get in line with the majority of states and just legalize it already.

When the National Archives and Records Administration handed over a trove of documents to the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection, some of the Trump White House records had been ripped up and then taped back together, according to three people familiar with the records.

Former president Donald Trump was known inside the White House for his unusual and potentially unlawful habit of tearing presidential records into shreds and tossing them on the floor – creating a headache for records management analysts who meticulously used Scotch tape to piece together fragments of paper that were sometimes as small as confetti, as Politico reported in 2018.

Yep, nothin’ to hide. 🙄

The purchase, announced by The Times on Monday, reflects the growing importance of games, like crosswords and Spelling Bee, in the company’s quest to grow digital subscriptions to 10 million by 2025.

Wordle was purchased from its creator, Josh Wardle, a software engineer in Brooklyn, for a price “in the low seven figures,” The Times said. The company said the game would initially remain free to new and existing players.

Ugh.

The addition of :focus-visible to WebKit was lead by the community, done by Igalia, and contributed to WebKit without any involvement from Apple except in the sense of their reviewing patches and accepting the contributions. Many of us are mad at Apple for a lot of good reasons, but please don’t let the process of venting that anger tar the goals and achievements of Open Prioritization. The future browser-feature priority you save may be your own.

That is Eric’s response to the dust-up over release 138 of Safari Technology Preview 11 days ago. You should read it in its entirety for a comprehensive breakdown. What a weird turn of events based on a misunderstanding of how open source projects are supposed to work. In less hectic but related news, the WebKit team published a good write up of :focus-visible today that’s worth reading too.

Rich-cli is a command line toolbox for fancy output in the terminal, built with Rich.

Use the rich command to highlight a variety of file types in the terminal, with specialized rendering for Markdown and JSON files. Additionally you can markup and format text from the command line.

I currently use Oh My Zsh to enable something similar but definitely going to give this a spin.

I suspect the answer is that they can edit Rogan – it’s probably built into his contract, because I can’t imagine Spotify lawyers would have allowed otherwise – but are choosing not to because they’re afraid of losing the portion of his fan base that revels in conspiracy and view him as an authority figure precisely because he legitimizes these things.

Just like with Facebook, engagement and advertising dollars are more important than ridding the platform of misinformation.

My son has been really into gardening/farming games recently. There’s one called Montessori Nature that he’s been playing on his iPad for years, but unfortunately it’s buggy and hasn’t been updated in ages. It also has several other points of frustration: namely, there’s not enough room to make a super gigantic garden, and the garden requires too much up-keep (plants wilt quickly, get eaten by pests, etc.). Charlie’s more interested in the design aspects of gardening–making something that looks cool, spelling his name in flowers, etc.

He has since downloaded and tried every single farming game from the App Store (I am not exaggerating). They are all either A) riddled with ads, B) super buggy, C) infested with IAPs or D) all of the above. Games like Stardew Valley, which are actually good, are too advanced for a 5-6 year old and include gameplay elements that he’s not interested in.

So, here I am, making a gardening game for kids. It will be called Charlie’s Garden, and it’s going to be the most chill, relaxing, do-whatever-you-want gardening sim. You’ll see different animals at different times of day and in different seasons, but the day/night cycle is quick enough to catch all of it in 30 minutes. There’s no experience levels, just in-game money (which will be easy to come by), so everything is unlocked from the get-go. There will be an element of exploration, maybe even some light crafting (what happens if I combine these items? Let’s find out!). I’m tossing around the idea of including a few mini-games. Scope-creep is real though, so I have a clearly-defined MVP that I will release first, before adding other stuff.

I have noticed the rampant bugs in these sorts of games and I have to wonder if maybe that is partly due to a user base that doesn’t flag them for the developer. Plans are to release the game as a paid upfront offering thank God. The vast majority of games designed for children are nothing more than a slot machine begging for more money to be spent. Becky has experienced this first hand so I look forward to seeing how this project progresses with that knowledge in mind.

Release your apps that aren’t suited for public distribution as unlisted on the App Store, discoverable only with a direct link. Unlisted apps don’t appear in any App Store categories, recommendations, charts, search results, or other listings. They can also be accessed through Apple Business Manager and Apple School Manager. Apps for specific organizations, special events, or research studies, or apps used as employee resources or sales tools are good candidates for unlisted distribution.

Such a nice policy change to see.

The YouTube/Spotify comparison just became much, much, more accurate (even though it’s a bit of a cop out) newsroom.spotify.com

@loudmouthjulia

Good thread on this topic.

The iOS 15.4 beta that was introduced today expands support for the custom email domain feature available for iCloud+, adding an option to set up a custom domain with ‌iCloud‌ Mail directly on the iPhone.

I don’t see myself needing this feature necessarily since this service has been set it and forget it for me, but glad to see it there for setup. I added three domains while iOS 15 was still in beta over the summer and experienced zero issues. The killer feature for me is push mail notification support for a custom domain. No need to jump into the Mail app to refresh IMAP when receiving a 2FA code or similar.

“I’ve decided to remove all my music from Spotify,” The Canadian singer-songwriter writes in a post on her website. “Irresponsible people are spreading lies that are costing people their lives. I stand in solidarity with Neil Young and the global scientific and medical communities on this issue.”

Mitchell also includes a link to an open letter to Spotify, which was signed by dozens of medical and scientific professionals in mid-January. It urges the platform to establish a misinformation policy to address the “misleading and false claims” propagated by the /Joe Rogan Experience/, such as Rogan’s suggestion that healthy young people shouldn’t get vaccinated against COVID-19.

Spotify basically spent $100 million to step in shit on a regular basis.

Apple killed off Dashboard at exactly the wrong time. Just one year after Catalina killed Dashboard, Apple started allowing developers to bring their iOS widgets over to the Mac in macOS Big Sur.

Totally agree with this piece. I always found Dashboard to be useful and with the advancement of the operating system as of late this would only ring more true. Widgets aren’t squeezed together with notifications on iOS but on macOS they are and it makes them feel like an afterthought.

Whereas, the original iPad was launched on January 27, 2010 – actually shipping to people on April 3 that year – and it has been a constant success since them. Once customers got to use the iPad, they saw how wrong the pundits, fans, and critics were – plus how right Steve Jobs turned out to be. Again.

I remember the biggest story at launch was the fact that it was rumored to be priced over a thousand dollars. Shock and awe when it was only $499.

Meet Rise, a new startup working on a calendar app that is specifically designed for team work. Rise helps you see what you have planned, check what your team is doing right now and, more importantly, schedule meetings that are as convenient as possible for the whole team.

Incredible design ideas going on here and glad to see more competition in this space.

MultiClock is a screensaver for macOS that displays the current time using 24 clocks. MultiClock is very configurable, with a variety of hand and dial styles and the ability to customize the color of each independently.

This is such a neat idea and written entirely in Swift.

After traveling hundreds of thousands of miles through space over the last month, NASA’s revolutionary new James Webb Space Telescope performed its last big course correction maneuver this afternoon, putting itself into its final resting place in space. Now, the observatory will live in perpetuity at a distance of roughly 1 million miles from the Earth, giving the vehicle a front-row view of the most ancient stars and galaxies of the Universe.

Loren is a great follow on Twitter for space related commentary too.

Dave Bateman sent an anti-Semitic screed to dozens of prominent figures in the Silicon Slopes, including the governor.

“I write this email knowing that many of you will think I’m crazy after reading it,” Bateman wrote. “I believe there is a sadistic effort underway to euthanize the American people. It’s obvious now. It’s undeniable, yet no one is doing anything. Everyone is discounting their own judgment, and dismissing their intuition.”

“I believe the Jews are behind this,” he continued. “For 300 years the Jews have been trying to infiltrate the Catholic Church and place a Jew covertly at the top. It happened in 2013 with Pope Francis. I believe the pandemic and systematic extermination of billions of people will lead to an effort to consolidate all the countries in the world under a single flag with totalitarian rule. I know, it sounds bonkers. No one is reporting on it, but the Hasidic Jews in the US instituted a law for their people that they are not to be vaccinated for any reason.”

I am awarding my first idiocy tag for this piece of crap.

Fixed: various inconsistencies for $variables across color schemes

Changed: moved head.html inside of the default.html layout file instead. This single change cut build times on a test site with 150 pages and 500 posts by 32%!

Improved: further refinements to visual elements for both light and dark mode

Improved: code blocks are now styled differently depending on color scheme

Donald Trump Jr. is both intensely unappealing and uninteresting. He combines in his person corruption, ineptitude, and banality. He is perpetually aggrieved; obsessed with trolling the left; a crude, one-dimensional figure who has done a remarkably good job of keeping from public view any redeeming qualities he might have.

There’s a case to be made that he’s worth ignoring, except for this: Don Jr. has been his father’s chief emissary to MAGA world; he’s one of the most popular figures in the Republican Party; and he’s influential with Republicans in positions of power. He’s also attuned to what appeals to the base of the GOP. So, from time to time, it is worth paying attention to what he has to say.

This says more about Trump supporters and the Republican party than anything else.

Evangelicals make up a large percentage of the GOP base yet here’s Don Jr.:

“If we get together, they cannot cancel us all. Okay? They won’t. And this will be contrary to a lot of our beliefs because—I’d love not to have to participate in cancel culture. I’d love that it didn’t exist. But as long as it does, folks, we better be playing the same game. Okay? We’ve been playing T-ball for half a century while they’re playing hardball and cheating. Right? We’ve turned the other cheek, and I understand, sort of, the biblical reference—I understand the mentality—but it’s gotten us nothing. Okay? It’s gotten us nothing while we’ve ceded ground in every major institution in our country.”

This idiot makes anti-vaxxers seem sensible. Sticking to the biblical references; a man reaps what he sows.

As a reminder, the legacy services for BlackBerry 7.1 OS and earlier, BlackBerry 10 software, BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.1 and earlier versions, will no longer be available after January 4, 2022. As of this date, devices running these legacy services and software through either carrier or Wi-Fi connections will no longer reliably function, including for data, phone calls, SMS and 9-1-1 functionality.

A finally that has been very long in the making. Totally missed this original notice back in September. I guess Apple event rumors and news cast a shadow. 😂

Stolen property. If you steal property, you must report its fair market value in your income in the year you steal it unless you return it to its rightful owner in the same year.

I bet there is a great tax loophole to be found here too.

California’s Department of Water Resources reported Tuesday that snowfall totals were 145% of normal for this date in the Northern Sierra Nevadas, 157% in the Central Sierra Nevadas, and 161% of normal in the Southern Sierra Nevadas. The snow totals for this month broke a 50-year record in Tahoe by more than 23 inches (58 centimeters): total December snowfall on Monday measured 16 feet and 1.7 inches (4.92 meters), according to the UC Berkeley Central Sierra Snow Lab. Of that snow total, 38.9 inches (98.8 centimeters) fell in 24 hours. The huge amount of snow in the area means that the Tahoe Basin is currently at 200% of average for snow water equivalent—the measurement of how much water would be produced when all the snow melts—for this time of year.

So happy to see this for a state that receives almost one third of its water supply from the winter snowpacks.

Autocorrect is as much psychology as technology. When I made the autocorrect system for the original iPhone, I thought a lot about whether people would understand the results they got. Even if people didn’t get want they want, I still wanted the results to seem sensible.

@kocienda

In response to this tweet by Steve Troughton-Smith:

Apple really needs to throw out its crowdsourced machine-learned autocorrect system entirely. Autocorrect used learn from everything I typed, now it interjects with typos & weirdisms from random internet users. It’s been a complete train wreck since they introduced this stuff.

@stroughtonsmith

I understand the benefit of machine learning for something like autocorrect and have even witnessed it firsthand. Whatever has changed in iOS 15, hopefully a bug rather than a programmed regression, is broken. I first noticed this using the betas over the summer and it has never improved. The most irritating instance for me is the question mark being replaced with an exclamation point!

Every. Single. Time.

Added: a tag cloud!

Added: a fresh coat of paint!

Fixed: a number of header tags that weren’t consistent across pages

Changed: if no color scheme is requested the default is now dark

Improved: various visual tweaks and refinements to both light and dark mode

Improved: tags are now styled on posts and on the tags page

Improved: archive displays the number of posts per month, year, category, tag

Improved: the external URL listed for the link: front matter will display the base domain as a source reference at the bottom of posts and link to the full URL

Removed: the related posts feature. Visually it became quite a busy mess at the bottom of each post; tags, source reference, footnotes, previous/next entries. Functionally it wasn’t that useful because it relied on site.related_posts which is time based only. Working on an alternate implementation.

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope launched at 7:20 a.m. EST Saturday on an Ariane 5 rocket from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana, South America.

A joint effort with ESA (European Space Agency) and the Canadian Space Agency, the Webb observatory is NASA’s revolutionary flagship mission to seek the light from the first galaxies in the early universe and to explore our own solar system, as well as planets orbiting other stars, called exoplanets.

“The James Webb Space Telescope represents the ambition that NASA and our partners maintain to propel us forward into the future,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. “The promise of Webb is not what we know we will discover; it’s what we don’t yet understand or can’t yet fathom about our universe. I can’t wait to see what it uncovers!”

The commentator was classic at launch this morning, “…from a tropical rainforest to the edge of time immemorial”.

(mac)OStalgia is exploring my 2021 work-from-home routine from a nostalgic perspective. How would have the same workflow looked like with the tools of today and the limitations of yesterday. Unreliable internet, little disk storage, macOS 9 and much more.

The project, the site’s design, and especially the videos are insanely cool.

Amazon early next year will pull the plug on Alexa.com — a website ranking and analytics service that’s unrelated to the ecommerce giant’s Alexa voice assistant platform.

“After more than two decades of helping you find, reach, and convert your digital audience, we will be retiring Alexa.com on May 1, 2022,” a notice on the site reads. “Thank you for making us your go-to resource for content research, competitive analysis, keyword research, and so much more.”

I’m honestly surprised it took this long to sunset it. Overall I would classify their metrics as wildly inaccurate.

The Pocket features a 3.5-inch LCD display made of Gorilla Glass, with 1600 × 1440 resolution. That’s 10 times the resolution of the original gray brick Game Boy. In practice, it looks absolutely amazing. Out of the box, the Pocket supports cartridges from the Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advance (for other supported platforms, see the sidebar on accessories) and it’s hard to overstate just how good these games look rendered at such a high resolution, with such a bright and sharp display. The monochrome look of the original Game Boy is crisp and clear, but it especially shines when you’re playing color games where you can really see the sprites pop.

This device looks insanely cool.

H&R Block, the tax-preparation company, has filed a lawsuit against Block, the e-payment company formerly known as Square, for alleged trademark infringement. In a press release Thursday, it argued that the rebranding by Jack Dorsey’s fintech giant is a “shortcut to capitalize on the well-known Block moniker” as well as a “clear violation” of the tax company’s trademark rights.

“Today’s filing,” CEO Jeff Jones explained in the release, “is an important effort to prevent consumer confusion and ensure a competitor cannot leverage the reputation and trust we have built over more than six decades.”

I definitely have to side with H&R Block on this one. They’ve even ran commercials for years with the slogan, “Block’s got your back”. Not to mention Cash App adding tax return filing as a feature. This is pretty clear cut.

The MacStories Selects Awards are our annual celebration of the apps we love and the people who make them. Every year, the MacStories team uses hundreds of apps. Some are familiar favorites, but most are new. So, after many months of testing those developers’ apps, we stop to recognize the best.

💻🏆🎉👏🏻

We are very excited to introduce to all of you the redesigned Notepad for Windows 11, which includes a number of changes we think the community will enjoy! First, you will notice a completely updated UI that aligns with the new visual design of Windows 11, including rounded corners, Mica, and more. We know how important Notepad is to so many of your daily workflows, so we designed this modern spin on the classic app to feel fresh, but familiar.

Refreshing Notepad to bring it inline with the new design style of Windows 11 is a natural progression and I’m sure many people are overjoyed to have dark mode support. The most important aspect of this update is the fact that very little changed. The beauty of Notepad is the simplicity and lack of features. Good on Microsoft for not ruining a perfectly usable app with unnecessary bloat.

A Stephens College alumna, 16-year-old Funk came to Columbia in 1956 from her home in Taos, N.M. Here she earned her pilot’s license and an associate’s degree, continuing her education at the University of Oklahoma, from which she graduated at age 20.

On July 20, at age 82, she traveled to the edge of space with Bezos and a few others on his Blue Origin New Shepard spacecraft.

In the months before the flight, Bezos visited Funk at her home.

“He said ‘Wally, I’m going up to space and I’m going to take you with me,’” Funk said. “I gave him a big hug.”

And she felt his butt, which she said was the flattest one she had seen on any man.

An odd choice of lede, but funny nonetheless.

Pantone’s Color of the Year announcement is often met with both curiosity and derision — in part because so many of the color choices seem so, well, basic: Classic Blue in 2020, Ultra Violet (purple) in 2018, Emerald (green) in 2013, all from their existing inventory of hues.

This year, however, for the first time in 23 years, the design world’s color experts have created a brand-new color to suit a world in transition: Very Peri, a warm shade of periwinkle blue with a violet red undertone.

As with previous years, the Color of the Year was chosen based on more than just design trends. “It expresses the mood of consumers and captures the collective mood of the world,” explained Laurie Pressman, the vice president of the Pantone Color Institute, over Zoom. “But it is also about psychology: the emotion that is tied into it. How do we capture what we are going through right now? It’s a complex color, a dynamic color. That’s what makes the color so interesting. It is an empowering mix.”

Leatrice Eiseman, executive director of the Pantone Color Institute, views the color as a futuristic take on blue. “It’s one of daring curiosity,” she said. “It’s an inquisitive color. It helps us to embrace this altered landscape.”

As I come back to the drawing board to reconsider design choices for my Jekyll theme Noir I have a feeling this warm, and well considered color is going to be incorporated in some manner.

“Searches for Kyle Rittenhouse resulted in a list of blank pages since shortly after the shooting in August 2020. Facebook said it would “still remove content that celebrates the death of the individuals killed in Kenosha”.

…but “we will no longer remove content containing praise or support of Rittenhouse”, a spokesperson said.

Mr Rittenhouse, 18, was cleared this month of two counts of homicide and one of attempted homicide.”

Oh, so glad to see the reversal, think of all the missed engagement and ad-serving opportunties gone to waste 🙄🤬

“Apple today announced Self Service Repair, which will allow customers who are comfortable with completing their own repairs access to Apple genuine parts and tools.”

“Creating greater access to Apple genuine parts gives our customers even more choice if a repair is needed,” said Jeff Williams, Apple’s chief operating officer. “In the past three years, Apple has nearly doubled the number of service locations with access to Apple genuine parts, tools, and training, and now we’re providing an option for those who wish to complete their own repairs.”

Hell froze, pigs flew. Guess Apple wanted to get ahead of the writing on the wall with this one.

It seems that Apple has quietly added a new tool in macOS Monterey for measuring your device’s Internet connectivity quality. You can simply call the executable networkQuality, which executes the following tests:

• Upload/download capacity (your Tx/Rx bandwidth essentially)
• Upload/download flows, this seems to be the number of test packets used for the responsiveness tests
• Upload/download responsiveness measured in Roundtrips Per Minute (RPM), which according to Apple, is the number of sequential round-trips, or transactions, a network can do in one minute under normal working conditions

I’m not sure why this new inclusion didn’t bubble to the surface during the summer. I just tested it in beta 1 of Monterey and it was already there at the beginning of the beta period. So glad to see this added because I will be using it constantly in scripts I run on remote macOS servers that I operate. Now if only there was a variant for testing local network speeds. 🧐

“Apple’s Weather app has a brand new design on iOS 15 that organizes data points like humidity and UV index into blocks. It’s really great on the iPhone at presenting a lot of information without being overwhelming.

For some reason, Apple’s Weather app on iPadOS 15 doesn’t have exactly the same design. Information is still organized into blocks, but a lot of the blocks are weirdly not about weather conditions.”

Absolutely hilarious! 🤣 (and sad at the same time)

“It was a gray day in late 2005. I was sitting at my desk, writing code for the next year’s iPod. Without knocking, the director of iPod Software–my boss’s boss–abruptly entered and closed the door behind him. He cut to the chase. “I have a special assignment for you. Your boss doesn’t know about it. You’ll help two engineers from the US Department of Energy build a special iPod. Report only to me.”

The next day, the receptionist called to tell me that two men were waiting in the lobby. I went downstairs to meet Paul and Matthew, the engineers who would actually build this custom iPod. I’d love to say they wore dark glasses and trench coats and were glancing in window reflections to make sure they hadn’t been tailed, but they were perfectly normal thirty-something engineers. I signed them in, and we went to a conference room to talk.”

It terms of how Apple operates all of the secrecy does seems like business as usual. It gets better…

“They didn’t actually work for the Department of Energy; they worked for a division of Bechtel, a large US defense contractor to the Department of Energy. They wanted to add some custom hardware to an iPod and record data from this custom hardware to the iPod’s disk in a way that couldn’t be easily detected. But it still had to look and work like a normal iPod.

They’d do all the work. My job was to provide any help they needed from Apple.

I learned that an official at the Department of Energy had contacted Apple’s senior vice president of Hardware, requesting the company’s help in making custom modified iPods. The senior VP passed the request down to the vice president of the iPod Division, who delegated it to the director of iPod Software, who came to see me. My boss was told I was working on a special project and not to ask questions.”

I can only imagine how Jobs would have reacted to this happening right under his nose. It hits on a lot of the same notes as the FBI seeking custom iOS software (and thus creating a backdoor) to catch a terrorist. The interplay of software used for this government project could have easily made its way around the darker parts of the web and then the image of the iPod would have been unjustly tainted for it.

“FRESNO, Calif. – The son of a California man who choked to death during an amateur taco eating contest at a minor league baseball game is suing the event’s organizers for negligence.

Eighteen-year-old Marshall Hutchings’ lawsuit filed Monday alleges his father, Dana Hutchings, was not made aware of the risks and danger involved in an eating competition, the Fresno Bee reported.”

I’m just going to leave this here…

“When they went on strike in 2016, members in the union for marshmallow makers chanted, “No justice, no Peeps!”

And on Thursday, a federal appeals court said the Peeps workers had a point.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled that Just Born Quality Confections, the firm in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, that makes the candy known as Peeps, could not unilaterally stop enrolling new employees in a pension without paying a penalty, something it had tried to do since 2015.”

This story ran in 2016 and Congress followed up in 2018. You would be excused for not noticing because of the shit show campaign cycle and resulting presidency that was happening.

“Fresh evidence of the U.S. outperformance appeared on Friday as the Labor Department reported that the economy had gained 916,000 new jobs in March and that the unemployment rate fell to a post-recession low of 6 percent. The Institute for Supply Management’s gauge of manufacturing activity released on Thursday hit its highest mark since December 1983.

These signs of U.S. strength came as Europe’s economic rebound stalled amid surging coronavirus case totals. France last week announced its third national lockdown; Germany and Italy have imposed partial restrictions on activities.

Accelerating progress in vaccinating people against the coronavirus, plus more generous government spending, explains the U.S. edge. As of the end of March, the United States had vaccinated more than twice as large a share of its population as had the European Union.”

Following the science and actually making an effort on a federal level to quicken the pace seems to be working. I wonder how long it will be before Trump takes credit for it. 🙄

“Announcement: the podcast is moving to @spotify!

Starting on September 1 the podcast will be available on Spotify as well as all platforms, and then at the end of the year it will move exclusively to Spotify, including the video version.

It will remain FREE, and it will be the exact same show. It’s just a licensing deal, so Spotify won’t have any creative control over the show. They want me to just continue doing it the way I’m doing it right now.

We will still have clips up on YouTube but full versions of the show will only be on Spotify after the end of the year.

I’m excited to have the support of the largest audio platform in the world and I hope you folks are there when we make the switch!”

I cannot understand why Apple doesn’t enter this market and own it.

“What happens next will likely depend on how rapidly the virus was spreading in a state before it reopened.

“If your R value is 0.95, it’s unlikely you can maintain a value of under 1 after you reopen,” Gu said.

But states with lower R values have more leeway – even if more people get exposed to the virus in public.

“If you go from 0.8 to 0.9, you’re still going to decrease” the overall spread, Gu said.”

This makes a strong case for moving to more rural parts of the country, even if only temporarily, in order to more safely partake in the new normal.

“Microsoft has settled the great space debate, and sided with everyone who believes one space after a period is correct, not two. The software giant has started to update Microsoft Word to highlight two spaces after a period (a full stop for you Brits) as an error, and to offer a correction to one space.”

You can easily disable this change but it will be the default moving forward. I haven’t used two spaces after a sentence (or double spaced sentences) since I was in high school. This habit makes sense when teachers utilize the additional white space for making corrections but outside of that limited use case there is no reason for it.

“When news of a mysterious viral pneumonia linked to a market in Wuhan, China, reached the outside world in early January, one of my first reactions was to order a modest supply of masks. Just a few weeks later, there wasn’t a mask to be bought in stores, or online for a reasonable price – just widespread price gouging. Many health experts, no doubt motivated by the sensible and urgent aim of preserving the remaining masks for health care workers, started telling people that they didn’t need masks or that they wouldn’t know how to wear them.

As the pandemic rages on, there will be many difficult messages for the public. Unfortunately, the top-down conversation around masks has become a case study in how not to communicate with the public, especially now that the traditional gatekeepers like media and health authorities have much less control. The message became counterproductive and may have encouraged even more hoarding because it seemed as though authorities were shaping the message around managing the scarcity rather than confronting the reality of the situation.”

I am definitely one of the many people who at first believed this false narrative. Unfortunately it is still being being repeated by the WHO.

“In the end, as history will record, the story that would have been the biggest news on Wednesday, March 11–the story that in normal times might have been the biggest headline of the month–will hardly register in America’s memory: That morning, at 11:06 am, a judge sentenced Hollywood super-producer turned super-predator Harvey Weinstein to 23 years in prison on sexual assault charges.

Yet within 12 hours, the staggering fact that Weinstein–the force behind an entire generation of movie classics from Shakespeare in Love to Pulp Fiction–might very well spend the rest of his life in prison turned out not only not to be the biggest story of the day, it wasn’t even the biggest Hollywood story of the day.

Instead, Wednesday, March 11, the 71st day of 2020, proved to be unlike any other in American history–the pivot point on which weeks of winter unease about the looming novel coronavirus turned in a matter of hours into a sudden, wrenching, nation-altering halt to daily life and routine. Just a day earlier, Americans across much of the country were still going into the office, meeting friends for drinks, and shaking hands in meetings. That morning, the number of coronavirus cases in the US crossed the 1,000 mark, up 10-fold from the prior week. Only 29 Americans had died.”

Up until today I had no idea that Weinstein had been sentenced to prison. Good.

420, 4:20, or 4/20 (pronounced four-twenty) is cannabis culture slang for marijuana consumption, especially smoking around the time 4:20 PM, and also refers to cannabis-oriented celebrations that take place annually on April 20 (which is 4/20 in U.S. form).

🍃

“Across the world, governments and health authorities are working together to find solutions to the COVID-19 pandemic, to protect people and get society back up and running. Software developers are contributing by crafting technical tools to help combat the virus and save lives. In this spirit of collaboration, Google and Apple are announcing a joint effort to enable the use of Bluetooth technology to help governments and health agencies reduce the spread of the virus, with user privacy and security central to the design.

Since COVID-19 can be transmitted through close proximity to affected individuals, public health organizations have identified contact tracing as a valuable tool to help contain its spread. A number of leading public health authorities, universities, and NGOs around the world have been doing important work to develop opt-in contact tracing technology. To further this cause, Apple and Google will be launching a comprehensive solution that includes application programming interfaces (APIs) and operating system-level technology to assist in enabling contact tracing. Given the urgent need, the plan is to implement this solution in two steps while maintaining strong protections around user privacy.”

I would never have guessed something like this would happen. If Google were to do this on their own all of the benefits it would provide would be shadowed by privacy concerns. Good on both companies for pursuing this together.

When I ask if he is hoarding anything, he is outraged. “Not a hoarder,” he said. “In fact, in a few months, if I walk into someone’s house and stumble onto 50 rolls of toilet paper in a closet somewhere, I will end the friendship. It’s tantamount to being a horse thief in the Old West.”

“I never could have lived in the Old West,” he added parenthetically. “I would have been completely paranoid about someone stealing my horse. No locks. You tie them to a post! How could you go into a saloon and enjoy yourself knowing your horse could get taken any moment? I would be so distracted. Constantly checking to see if he was still there.”

This is exactly the sort of light-hearted coverage we need in the midst of all the chaos that is happening right now.

“When I was a kid, there was really only one existential threat the world faced. The threat of a nuclear war. By the late 1990s, most reasonable people had come to accept that climate changed represented another major threat to humankind.

I view the threat of deadly pandemics right up there with nuclear war and climate change. Innovation, cooperation, and careful planning can dramatically mitigate the risks presented by each of these threats.

I’m optimistic that a decade from now, we can be much better prepared for a lethal epidemic–if we’re willing to put a fraction of what we spend on defense budgets and new weapons systems into epidemic readiness.”

I certainly read this quite differently given what we are currently dealing with on a global scale. Too bad it wasn’t taken more seriously by the right people at the time.

“Due to COVID-19, the Unicode Consortium has decided to postpone the release of version 14.0 of the Unicode Standard by 6 months, from March to September of 2021. This delay will also impact related specifications and data, such as new emoji characters.”

😥

“Covid-19 is showing us that when humanity is united in common cause, phenomenally rapid change is possible. None of the world’s problems are technically difficult to solve; they originate in human disagreement. In coherency, humanity’s creative powers are boundless. A few months ago, a proposal to halt commercial air travel would have seemed preposterous. Likewise for the radical changes we are making in our social behavior, economy, and the role of government in our lives. Covid demonstrates the power of our collective will when we agree on what is important. What else might we achieve, in coherency? What do we want to achieve, and what world shall we create? That is always the next question when anyone awakens to their power.”

This essay is one of the most incisive things that I have read about coronavirus thus far. It’s definitely a must-read piece and as a bonus there is also an audio version available.

“The original NASA insignia is one of the most powerful symbols in the world. A bold, patriotic red chevron wing piercing a blue sphere, representing a planet, with white stars, and an orbiting spacecraft. Today, we know it as “the meatball.” However, with 1970’s technology, it was a difficult icon to reproduce, print, and many people considered it a complicated metaphor in what was considered, then, a modern aerospace era.

Enter a cleaner, sleeker design born of the Federal Design Improvement Program and officially introduced in 1975. It featured a simple, red unique type style of the word NASA. The world knew it as “the worm.” Created by the firm of Danne & Blackburn, the logo was honored in 1984 by President Reagan for its simplistic, yet innovative design.

NASA was able to thrive with multiple graphic designs. There was a place for both the meatball and the worm. However, in 1992, the 1970s brand was retired - except on clothing and other souvenir items - in favor of the original late 1950s graphic.

Until today.

The worm is back. And just in time to mark the return of human spaceflight on American rockets from American soil.”

Such a great typeface logo, it looks just as modern today as it originally did in 1975.

“Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont dropped out of the Democratic presidential race on Wednesday, concluding a quest for the White House that began five years ago in relative obscurity but ultimately elevated him as a champion of the working class, a standard-bearer of American liberalism and the leader of a self-styled political revolution.”

Now let’s just hope he can persuade his fans to rally behind Joe Biden in a big way.

“Apple CEO Tim Cook has provided an update on the company’s response to the COVID-19 crisis. In a video posted to Twitter, Cook says Apple has sourced more than 20 million masks through its global supply chain and is working with governments to donate them where they’re needed.

Apple has also launched “a company-wide effort bringing together product designers, engineering, operations, packaging teams, and our suppliers to design, produce and ship face shields for health workers,” according to Cook, who showed off one of these shields in the video.”

This is an incredible effort on Apple’s part to quickly turn their manufacturing capabilities towards something that hospitals all over the world are in dire need of. Even better is the fact that they are treating it like a true to form Apple product, including a support document!

“In America, we still tend to think of face masks as a defensive shield to ward off illness. This is one reason there has been a run on respirators and hospital-grade masks. People treat it like a space helmet and want the strongest possible protection, doctors be damned.

But that is thinking about it backwards. The point of wearing a mask in public is not to protect yourself, but to protect other people from you. We know that many people who fall ill won’t show symptoms during the time when they are most infectious. Some people may even remain asymptomatic through the whole course of the disease, never knowing they had it.

The safest thing to do is assume you’re sick all the time, and wear the mask.

The job of protecting you, meanwhile, falls to everyone else! That’s why it’s so important that we adopt mask wearing as a social norm. When enough sick people wear masks, even of the most rudimentary kind, it becomes difficult for a disease like coronavirus to spread in the population.”

I am beginning to see many more people wearing masks than I did when this outbreak started but it’s nowhere near perfect yet. We haven’t had an experience like this in the United States until now so we don’t have the social conditioning that Asian countries adopted a long time ago…it is definitely starting to happen now.

Schaffner told us: “If you are concerned about the outside of food packages being contaminated, I suggest that you wash your hands and or sanitize your hands before you sit down to eat any food that you might’ve taken out of those containers… Washing your hands before you eat is a best practice even when we’re not in a pandemic.”

“The idea of a tablet computer had been kicked around for years, fueled in large part by science fiction (Star Trek’s PADD immediately springs to mind) and ever-shrinking components. A handful of companies gambled on the concept, too, and Microsoft’s late-90s attempt was easily the most ambitious of the bunch. It languished, as did all the others, for similar reasons. They were unwieldy. They were expensive. Their software wasn’t well-suited to, you know, tablet things. And then came the iPad, which solved just about all of those problems.”

This is a nice trip down memory lane.

“iPad models beginning in 2020 also feature the hardware microphone disconnect. When an MFI compliant case (including those sold by Apple) is attached to the iPad and closed, the microphone is disconnected in hardware, preventing microphone audio data being made available to any software–even with root or kernel privileges in iPadOS or in case the firmware is compromised.”

So great to see this security feature making an appearance in more products now. I’m curious to know how the always listening, ‘Hey, Siri’ functionality¹ is integrated because that is not available on a Mac with the lid closed.

”About 10 miles off the coast of mainland Rhode Island, nestled in between Montauk and Martha’s Vineyard, lies the tiny porkchop-shaped jewel of Block Island.

The island’s only township, New Shoreham, relies almost entirely on summer tourism to fuel its economy, and come spring, residents are typically welcoming visitors back with open arms. But this year, as the novel coronavirus spreads across the United States, many of the town’s roughly 1,000 year-rounders are pleading with outsiders to stay away until the dust settles.”

New Jersey needs to be more on top of this same issue happening here. Even though we are a hotspot there are still people traveling into the state to bunker down in their vacation homes.

Ronald Brownstein:

”The counties confronting the largest number of cases are primarily large urban centers that account for a disproportionate share of America’s gross domestic product and jobs, according to a new analysis conducted for The Atlantic by the Brookings Institution Metropolitan Policy Program. As of Tuesday morning, the 50 counties with the most cases accounted for more than one-third of the nation’s economic output and nearly one-third of its jobs, Brookings found.”

I wouldn’t call it pointless so much as I would call it impossible.

”The Amazon Prime Video apps for iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV now allow customers to purchase and rent movies and TV shows within the app, and Apple appears to be allowing Amazon to use its own payment system, skirting the traditional in-app purchase screens.”

Hell froze, pigs flew. If this is an April Fools’ Day joke it’s the best one ever.

“Today we have some important and exciting news to share: Dark Sky has joined Apple.

Our goal has always been to provide the world with the best weather information possible, to help as many people as we can stay dry and safe, and to do so in a way that respects your privacy.

There is no better place to accomplish these goals than at Apple. We’re thrilled to have the opportunity to reach far more people, with far more impact, than we ever could alone.”

This is great news for the stock Weather app, maybe it will actually be useable now. It is not such great news for the vast number of third party applications on both iOS and Android that depend on the API for accurate weather data. I currently use Carrot Weather which does offer the ability to choose from alternative data sources but this functionality is also behind a subscription paywall. It will be interesting to see how these companies adapt.

“The lights are still on in Times Square. Billboards blink and storefronts shine in neon. If only there were an audience for this spectacle.

But the thoroughfares have been abandoned. The energy that once crackled along the concrete has eased. The throngs of tourists, the briskly striding commuters, the honking drivers have mostly skittered away.

In their place is a wistful awareness that plays across all five boroughs: Look how eerie our brilliant landscape has become. Look how it no longer bustles.

This is not the New York City anyone signed up for.”

A perfect piece to describe the times in which we live and incredible photography too.

“When Apple released the first iOS 13.4 beta in early February, one of the more notable additions was a brand new CarKey API that makes it possible for Apple Watch and iPhone owners to start, lock, and unlock their vehicles directly from their devices.

Even cooler is that the API will allow device owners to share access with friends and family members via one-time keys. Imagine, for instance, the ability to remotely give a friend of yours the ability to unlock and drive your car with their own iPhone or Apple Watch.”

Apple has made it mostly possible for me to ditch my wallet by creating Apple Pay¹. I’m able to access my home without a physical key because of smart locks powered by HomeKit. Now they are working to make car keys/fobs extinct. As a nerd I absolutely love the idea of leaving the house with only an iPhone in my pocket or a Watch on my wrist. As if it hasn’t already been the case for years now, this takes the digital hub strategy introduced in 2001 as being centered around the Mac and turns it on it’s head.

“It’s never been more important to support each other. We’re making a substantial donation including medical supplies to Protezione Civile in Italy, to help the heroic first responders, medical personnel & volunteers working tirelessly to protect & save lives. Vicini all’🇮🇹 ❤️”

Apple is putting funding into local relief efforts as well.

“Across Tennessee Avenue, out in front of EZ Super Mart store, a 51-year-old homeless man recently out of jail and a teen who says he’s a heroin addict are waiting for their chance at a few bucks – most likely, they each said separately, by acting as low-level go-betweens for drug dealers…”

I’ve been waiting to see a real story about this in The Philadelphia Inquirer for a very long time. The store owners on Atlantic and Pacific Avenues are allowing a drug trade to happen openly all day long. There are arrests being made but it has been a very rampant issue for many years now. Winter time in the city has always felt more depressing because of this constant scene happening in the main downtown area.

The facade reads “LOTS CORN R” on Atlantic; from Tennessee Avenue, the sign is down to “LOTS COR R.”

This has since been fixed. I wonder if it was because of this article? 🤔

“While we don’t have much to say about the spread of the virus itself – let’s leave that to the experts – it is worth looking at how we discuss and respond to a threat like this online.”

This is an interesting and lighthearted read amongst all of the craziness that our current reality is bringing nowadays.

“Microsoft Corp. today announced that Co-Founder and Technology Advisor Bill Gates stepped down from the company’s Board of Directors to dedicate more time to his philanthropic priorities including global health, development, education, and his increasing engagement in tackling climate change. He will continue to serve as Technology Advisor to CEO Satya Nadella and other leaders in the company.”

End of an era.

“Reviewing the new Mac Pro has been an interesting challenge. It’s very much the product that professional Mac users have been asking Apple to make for years: a modular, high-performance Mac tower. And demand for such a machine is well and truly pent up: Apple’s last Mac Pro came out in 2013, featuring a daring cylindrical design that the company was unable to update for years because of thermal issues. After much consternation about the future of the Mac, Apple admitted it needed to start all over with the Mac Pro in 2017. Two and a half years later, we’re looking at one of the most precisely and cleverly engineered desktop computers ever made. I have been dying to review it.”

This is the one review I had really been looking forward to reading and it did not disappoint. It was accompanied by a great discussion on The Vergecast this week too.

“We are devastated to share this news with you. “The show must go on” is in our DNA, and this is the first time in 34 years that the March event will not take place. We are now working through the ramifications of this unprecedented situation.”

This is very unfortunate because for many people SXSW is a huge opportunity to garner exposure but this is the responsible thing to do. This comes on the heels of Facebook canceling F8 and Google canceling I/O…all that is left now is for Apple to cancel WWDC.

“Our quarterly guidance issued on January 28, 2020 reflected the best information available at the time as well as our best estimates about the pace of return to work following the end of the extended Chinese New Year holiday on February 10. Work is starting to resume around the country, but we are experiencing a slower return to normal conditions than we had anticipated. As a result, we do not expect to meet the revenue guidance we provided for the March quarter due to two main factors.

The first is that worldwide iPhone supply will be temporarily constrained. While our iPhone manufacturing partner sites are located outside the Hubei province – and while all of these facilities have reopened – they are ramping up more slowly than we had anticipated. The health and well-being of every person who helps make these products possible is our paramount priority, and we are working in close consultation with our suppliers and public health experts as this ramp continues. These iPhone supply shortages will temporarily affect revenues worldwide.

The second is that demand for our products within China has been affected. All of our stores in China and many of our partner stores have been closed. Additionally, stores that are open have been operating at reduced hours and with very low customer traffic. We are gradually reopening our retail stores and will continue to do so as steadily and safely as we can. Our corporate offices and contact centers in China are open, and our online stores have remained open throughout.”

Like I said.

“Zuckerberg was entering one of the most productive periods in his life. A few weeks after I met him, he would lay out a ludicrously ambitious vision for Facebook. In a journal with unlined 8-by-10 paper, he sketched his mission and product design and explored how a tiny company might become a vital utility for the world. In detail, he described features called Open Registration and Feed, two products that would supercharge his company.

Zuckerberg found focus in that notebook and others. In his jottings are the seeds of what would come–all the greatness and the failings of Facebook. Over the next 10 years, Zucker­berg would execute the plans he drew up there. Facebook would transform itself from a college student hangout to the dominant social media service, with a population bigger than that of any country in the world, and was on its way to having more members than any religion. Zuckerberg’s gospel insisted that more and more sharing was an inherent good. In addition to bringing people together, Facebook became a source of news, entertainment, and even life-saving information. The company monetized its user base with ads, and Zuckerberg became one of the richest people in the world, his name hoisted into the pantheon of PC Forum legends.”

Such a great write-up.

“Mobile World Congress, the wireless industry’s annual showcase, typically attracts 100,000 representatives from technology companies, carriers, and governments to Barcelona, Spain. But not this year. The GSM Association, an industry group that organizes the gathering, said Wednesday it is pulling the plug on this year’s affair, the latest fallout from the coronavirus global health emergency.

“The GSMA has canceled MWC Barcelona 2020 because the global concern regarding the coronavirus outbreak, travel concerns and other circumstances, make it impossible for the GSMA to hold the event,” the organization said.”

Expect to see a whole lot more of this happening.

Taika Waititi jokes about what writers should be asking for in the next round of talks with producers: “Apple needs to fix those keyboards. They are impossible to write on. They’ve gotten worse. It makes me want to go back to PCs” #Oscars

~ @Variety

It’s funny to see this topic make an appearance in mainstream culture but not a great look for Apple. They have introduced new scissor switch keyboards but the majority of their product line is still stuck on a multi-year mistake.

“When your recently used apps appear, the apps aren’t open, but they’re in standby mode to help you navigate and multitask. You should force an app to close only if it’s unresponsive.”

Just sayin’.

“The widespread admiration for Apple’s design ethos during Jobs’s tenure was in two parts: one functional, the other aesthetic. The functional aspects of Apple’s products in the era of Jobs were considered magical and thrilling. But the vibe of Apple’s product design is uniformly cool and impersonal, and the monolithic sterility of their glassy retail palaces is really something shocking. So far as design goes, it’s always been an imperial aesthetic, entirely lacking a human dimension – or a potted plant. And this was so no matter how much the marketers tried to soften things up with the aid of Justin Long, John Hodgman and sassy dancing silhouettes.”

While I don’t agree with many of the conclusions drawn by Bustillos about Jobs in this piece it is a very informative and well-written look at the design ethos of Apple.

“A beautiful new user interface. Feature parity on every platform. Beautiful full screen modes on iPhone and iPad (and the Mac has never looked better). Synced calendar sets (🎉). Weather. Interesting Calendars. Proposals with automatic scheduling. Even better tasks support. And so much more.”

I have been testing out this new app in beta for quite a while now and am more than happy with the changes this latest release brings. The biggest one in my mind being feature parity on every platform. It is difficult to make use of a feature even if you would like to when it isn’t available on every device, so this is a big win all-around. Having the ability to now create calendar sets is also something I didn’t know I wanted until I had it.

Yes, the app has moved from a one-time cost to a subscription model and while I could write about this I don’t really need to add anything more to the conversation that has been happening.

“Ah, scissors. They’re important enough that we have an emoji for them. On your device, it appears as ✂️. Unlike the real world tool it represents, the emoji’s job is to convey the idea, especially at small sizes. It doesn’t need to be able to swing or cut things. Nevertheless, let’s judge them on that irrelevant criterion.”

This is such a fun little observation. I have never even thought to consider whether or not the two blades of a scissor emoji would close properly and the fact that they don’t shows how few people actually have questioned it.

“Samsung and Apple have a complicated history. But in reality, it mostly boils down to Samsung “borrowing” design language and features from Apple and then using them in its phones and tablets. Things aren’t as bad as they once were, but yesterday the company showed a slide about Samsung Pass. And on that slide was Apple’s Face ID icon.”

You can’t even call this “creative inspiration” on Samsung’s part. It is literally a copy and paste job of Apple’s Face ID icon. What makes it even worse is that the graphic design of the Face ID icon is inspired by the Finder icon which has roots going all the way back to 1984.

“Apple rolled into the TV game with a superb drama about the importance of dignity and doing the right thing, made by a company that runs sweatshops in China. So, you say you’re woke, but the companies you work for, unbelievable. Apple, Amazon, Disney. If ISIS started a streaming service, you’d call your agent, wouldn’t you?

If you do win an award tonight, don’t use it as a platform to make a political speech. You’re not in a position to lecture the public about anything. You know nothing about the real-world. Most of you spent less time in school than Greta Thunberg. So, if you win, come up, accept your little award, thank your agent and your god, and fuck off.”

Damn. No pandering happening onstage this year.

“It’s official. Consumer Reports’ engineers have just completed testing the iPhone 4, and have confirmed that there is a problem with its reception. When your finger or hand touches a spot on the phone’s lower left side—an easy thing, especially for lefties—the signal can significantly degrade enough to cause you to lose your connection altogether if you’re in an area with a weak signal. Due to this problem, we can’t recommend the iPhone 4.”

This issue, dubbed “Antennagate”, was completey overblown at the time. It really only affected a very small number of placed calls but that didn’t stop a class-action lawsuit from being launched. This lead to tarnishing the perception of what ended up being one of the most successful product launches in Apple’s history. Ultimately this was resolved by the introduction of a free iPhone 4 case program that alleviated interference with the antennae.

While that problem alone was enough to make constant headlines it was actually second in line to the delayed released of the white iPhone 4. It started out as only being a few weeks, which turned into months and finally ended in April of the following year. I can very clearly recall how frustrating this was to people at the time and was reminded of it when a similar situation happened with HomePod. It is unfortunate that this negative news cycle had to dominate discussions about Apple and the company’s focus in the last year of Steve’s life.

“As he started to talk, everything about him became familiar at once; he slipped so effortlessly into the sleek carapace of his fame. The very air of vulnerability he projected, along with the rough candor, was part of this persona. But in fact he was a very private person, as his assistant, Laurie Woolever, reminded me after his death. Something I’d already known, from reading his books; he’d liked the piece I’d written about him and sent me an unbelievably kind note about it, which was what had emboldened me to ask for an interview. That, and he was famously generous to writers in general.”

Such a great, very well written piece here about a man who was both infinitely inspiring and deeply misunderstood. Every time I rewatch episodes of his various travel shows I learn something new and the same can be said for this interview.

“If you used your credit card or debit card to buy gas or pay for snacks at any Wawa convenience store, anytime in the past nine months, your card information may have been skimmed by malware. The Philadelphia-based gas and convenience store chain says it discovered the malware on its payment processing servers on December 10th, but it took quite a while for the company to notice – the malware may have affected all 700 of its locations across five states since March.”

Wawa makes a lot of money¹ according to an Inc. report from last year. The sheer number of daily transactions make it a prime target for scammers and I’m honestly surprised this is only just now happening. The credit/debit card numbers, expiration dates and customers’ names were exposed but PIN and security codes weren’t which hints that at least some layer of security is in place and being well-kept. Regardless of a malware infection, I wouldn’t be surprised if the stolen data had been stored in plaintext.

I believe the people responsible for infecting Wawa’s servers didn’t really gain anything from doing so other than to prove that they could otherwise we would have heard about this long before now. That doesn’t excuse the extreme carelessness by the security team at Wawa though. It having to take nine months to discover the issue is downright appalling. Hopefully Wawa mitigates the error of their ways and moving forward will have regular external audits of their systems performed. Nothing is going to keep me from stopping in for a yellow cake donut a few times per year month though 😛.

“It seems Facebook just couldn’t make it through to the end of the year without another privacy-related incident. Only this time around, its own employees are affected. A thief broke into a payroll worker’s car and stole hard drives that reportedly contained unencrypted payroll information for around 29,000 current and former US employees.

The theft took place on November 17th and Facebook noticed that the drives were missing three days later…”

I am having trouble even deciding which aspect of this is the worst part. The unbelievable idea that this type of sensitive data is stored on a mobile hard drive, it being stored unencrypted or the fact that it took three days to notice it was missing. 🙄

“The Critics Choice nominations were dominated by Netflix, with 61 nominations for its movies and TV shows – 14 of them just for The Irishman, which is up for top awards like Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor. Other streaming services also fared better, including Amazon Prime Video (14), Hulu (seven) and CBS All Access (four). It’s more than a little obvious that Apple is a newcomer with just a handful of shows under its belt.”

The Golden Globe nominations are being announced tomorrow so it will be interesting to see if Apple receives any more nominations. Of any show they have released so far, ‘The Morning Show’ is definitely the best one on offer.

“Macintosh System Tools Version 6.0 floppy disk, signed in black felt tip, “steve jobs.” In fine condition, with slight brushing to the ink. A hugely desirable format for Jobs’s seldom-seen autograph–known as a reluctant signer, he often declined to comply with the requests of collectors. As a piece of Apple’s iconic Mac OS software, boasting Jobs’s elegantly stylish lowercase signature, this is a museum-quality piece of computing history.”

Originally it was estimated that this would auction off for around $7,500 but ended up selling for a mind-boggling sum of $84,115. The real question though is whether the data on disk is still usable and if the buyer will ever try to find out.

“We are excited to announce such a diverse group of 2019 App Store winners, showing that great design and creativity comes from developers large and small, and from every corner of the world. We congratulate all the winners and thank them for making 2019 the best year yet for the App Store.”

There are certainly some very well crafted apps highlighted in these awards, a few of the games are truly works of art. Where it falls down for me though is the chart of the most downloaded apps of the year. Out of the top twenty free apps listed they are including Netflix, Amazon, DoorDash, Uber and Hulu. Sure you can download the actual app for free but the entire purpose of the apps existing is to connect you to their various paid services. It just seems a little disingenuous on Apple’s part and also somewhat disappointing that we are unable to see five more apps that are truly free make this list and be given their due reputability and exposure.