By John Gruber

• Archive
• The Talk Show
• Dithering
• Projects
• Contact
• Colophon
• RSS Feed
• Twitter
• Sponsorship

‘Succession’ Finale ★

Alan Sepinwall, writing for Rolling Stone:

A lot happens over the course of the 90-minute Succession series finale, “With Open Eyes.” Alliances are made, broken, and made again. Votes happen, fortunes rise and fall, losers become winners, and vice versa.

For all intents and purposes, though, the only part that matters is a five-minute sequence toward the end.

I’m always wary of recency bias, but at the moment I’d put Succession in the hall of fame for the best TV shows ever. Four great seasons, a rich ensemble of vivid memorable characters, never a bad episode, and a truly great finale.

See also: Sepinwall’s ranking of the top 25 characters on Succession, from least to most despicable.

The Talk Show: ‘One True HIG’ ★

Neil Jhaveri, founder and lead developer of Mimestream, the terrific new native Mac email client for Gmail, joins the show to talk about email, Mac apps, and indie software development.

Sponsored by:

• Trade Coffee: Let’s Coffee Better. Get a free bag of fresh coffee with any Trade subscription.
• Memberful: Monetize your passion with membership. Start your free trial today.
• Rocket Money: Stop throwing your money away. Cancel unwanted subscriptions and manage your expenses the easy way.

Adam Engst: ‘Why I Use Mimestream for Gmail’ ★

Adam Engst, writing at TidBITS:

Where Mimestream shines is in its attention to visual form and functional detail — the small interface elements and features that make working with email feel familiar, fluid, and fast. I spend hours per day in email, and while I’m willing to tweak my working habits slightly to match what an app can do, I prefer it to accommodate my idiosyncrasies.

For instance, I seldom delete messages. My Google account has plenty of space, and Gmail’s performance doesn’t degrade with massive email stores, so I prefer to keep everything for posterity and focus my attention on unread and starred messages. So it’s vital that my email client supports that approach rather than pushing its own concept of Inbox Zero or whatever philosophy it might have.

I can’t predict what refinements and affordances will make working with your email a joy, so I want to share some of what I find compelling about Mimestream. Many of these aren’t unique, they’re just very well done, and the result is that using Mimestream feels like driving a well-engineered automobile instead of a low-end car that feels like it was assembled from cheap, off-the-shelf components.

Kolide ★

My thanks to Kolide for their continuing sponsorship support here at DF — they sponsored Daring Fireball last week, and they are the presenting sponsor at the upcoming The Talk Show Live From WWDC. They’re a great company with a great product.

Here’s an uncomfortable fact: at most companies, employees can download sensitive company data onto any device, keep it there forever, and never even know that they’re doing something wrong. Kolide’s new report, The State of Sensitive Data, addresses this issue head-on.

Kolide offers a more nuanced approach than MDM solutions to setting and enforcing sensitive data policies. Their premise is simple: if an employee’s device is out of compliance, it can’t access your apps. Kolide lets admins run queries to detect sensitive data, flag devices that have violated policies, and enforce OS and browser updates so vulnerable devices aren’t accessing data.

To learn more and see Kolide in action, visit kolide.com.

Sunday, 28 May 2023

WordPress Turns 20 ★

It’s funny what gains traction for the long haul, and what turns out, in hindsight, to be a flash in the pan. I, for one, never would have predicted that WordPress would grow to become, by far, the most popular CMS in the world, and the foundation of a thriving company whose primary goal is making the web a better platform.

Saturday, 27 May 2023

Mimestream 1.0 ★

After a few years in public beta, Mimestream 1.0 is out, and it’s fantastic. Mimestream is a Mac email client specifically for Gmail. They’ve got plans to expand to iOS, and plans to perhaps expand to IMAP (and JMAP) email accounts in the future, but as it stands today, Mimestream does one thing and does it incredibly well: it’s a true Mac app for Gmail. It’s both a great Mac app and a great Gmail client. $5/month or $50/year, with a two-week free trial.

Jason Snell:

Apple Mail is free. Gmail in a browser window is free. But after two years with Mimestream, I couldn’t put down my credit card fast enough.

Mona: Mastodon Client for Mac and iOS ★

I quipped yesterday that I thought Ivory for Mac wasn’t just the best Mac Mastodon client, but the only good one. A bunch of readers chimed in to endorse Mona, by Junyu Kuang, as a good Mac client. I had tried Mona a while back, and found it lacking in numerous ways on the Mac, but I took another look yesterday and my readers are correct: it’s a very solid Mac client now. Free to try, $10 to go “pro” on any one platform (Mac, iPhone, iPad), and just $16 to go pro on all three. Those are introductory prices that are going up on June 1.

Friday, 26 May 2023

Platformer: ‘Inside Twitter’s Failed Space Launch’ ★

Zoë Schiffer and Casey Newton, reporting for Platformer:

Spaces are hosted on Twitter’s own servers and servers rented from Amazon Web Services. AWS servers for Spaces are “insanely underprovisioned” relative to the need for them, according to a former employee who worked on the project.

On Wednesday, the lack of servers led to a predictable series of cascading failures. In the run-up to the event, engineers expected that Spaces would be able to accommodate hundreds of thousands of users. But too many people joined the first stream simultaneously, and the app kept crashing as a result.

Musk’s own Twitter app crashed repeatedly during the event, we’re told. Musk, who uses the employee-only build of the app known as Earlybird, was said to be furious afterward.

I’m sure he was.

Inside the largest Slack and Discord channels of former tweeps, the mood after DeSantis’ botched announcement was nothing short of jubilant.

I’m sure it was.

Texas Monthly Profiles Tapbots Founders Paul Haddad and Mark Jardine ★

Speaking of Tapbots, here’s Andrew Logan writing for Texas Monthly:

Amir Shevat, Twitter’s former head of product for the developer platform, who lives in Round Rock, was responsible for ensuring that the tools Twitter provided independent software developers using the platform met their needs. He said about 17 percent of engagement on Twitter, historically, was through third-party apps, which played a vital role in defining Twitter’s identity.

To my knowledge no one at (or formerly at) Twitter has ever revealed that before. Obviously the overwhelming number of Twitter users only ever used Twitter’s own first-party clients. The reason third-party clients were so important to Twitter, though, is that Twitter power users were drawn to them.

Jardine said he has received positive feedback on the initial launch of Ivory, which he admits was released without all the features he wanted to include. Users being excited about his work is uplifting, he said. But that’s not what entirely motivates him. “Without [Ivory], we have no business,” Jardine said. “There’s a lot of pressure riding on it.”

Despite the pressure, Haddad seems to be thriving in this brave new world. “I’m not at the whims of a dictator anymore,” he said.

Amen to that.

Ivory for Mac ★

Now shipping in the Mac App Store: Tapbots’s Ivory for Mac. I’ve been using it in beta for a few months, and don’t know what I’d do without it. It’s not just the best Mac Mastodon client, it’s the only good one that exists. $15/year just for the Mac client, but the real deal is Ivory’s $25/year “universal” subscription for Ivory across both MacOS and iOS.

Ivory for Mac is written using Catalyst, but it by no means is just Ivory for iPad with a few tweaks. (If that’s what it were, Tapbots could have shipped it months ago, when Ivory for iPhone and iPad shipped.) Ivory for Mac is a Mac app. But, numerous Catalyst-isms show through. System-wide Services menu items don’t work. Smart punctuation (automatic curly quotes and proper em-dashes when you type two hyphens) only work when you type slowly. Some views scroll via standard keyboard shortcuts (space/shift-space, Page Up/Page Down), but some don’t. A lot of these are things that I consider shortcomings in Apple’s Catalyst framework — the whole point of Cocoa from 20+ years ago is that standard controls get standard behavior out of the box, relieving developers from the drudgery of making simple expected platform-standard features work. Catalyst isn’t like that — or at least isn’t like that yet.

But this is Ivory for Mac 1.0. Progress during beta testing was steady, and knowing Tapbots’s high standards, I’m quite sure will continue to be. And on the whole, Ivory for Mac as it stands today is not just a glass of ice water in hell, it’s a whole pitcher. If you use Mastodon on a Mac, you’re nuts if you don’t try Ivory.

See also: John Voorhees’s review at MacStories.

Tetris on a Chicken McNugget ★

There hasn’t been a decent Tetris game for the Mac in decades, but now you can play it on a Chicken McNugget. What a world. (Via Kottke.)

Thursday, 25 May 2023

Discord Adds Support for Markdown ★

I hate to complain as Markdown continues its march to world domination,^* but it’s really dumb that Discord added syntax for underlining (and ugly syntax at that). The only reason underlining should be used today, in any context, is to indicate hyperlinks. Any other use of underlining should be considered a typographical faux pas.

* Where by hate I of course mean love.

‘DeSantis Blows Up on the Launch Pad’ ★

Taegan Goddard, writing at Political Wire on Ron DeSantis’s much-ballyhooed campaign launch on Twitter Spaces yesterday:

In the end, the event had all of the appeal of a glitchy conference call.

Politics aside, the event was humiliating for Elon Musk and Twitter. The space crashed on the server side several times, and it crashed the Twitter app on my iPhone at least 6 or 7 times. And even when it finally got going, the audio quality was terrible.

Wednesday, 24 May 2023

Bungie Teases the Return of Marathon ★

There were hints about this last fall, but now it’s official: Bungie is reviving Marathon:

Marathon is currently in development for playstation 5, xbox series x/s, and pc with full cross play and cross save.

This news either evokes some strong feelings and memories, or you were not a Mac gamer in the ’90s. I get it, but it seems downright criminal that the Mac isn’t on their platform list.

2023 Apple Design Award Finalists ★

Always an interesting perusal. Apps on my iPhone that made the list: Flighty, Camo, and Knotwords. Oh, and Universe — a very ambitious website/store builder for iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

Steve Jobs Demos the Macintosh for Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, and Kenny Scharf at Sean Lennon’s 9th Birthday Party in 1984 ★

If I’ve seen these snapshots before, I’d forgotten them. Extraordinary how casual they are, sitting on the floor in a cramped bedroom like teenagers. Nice find from the gang at Poolsuite. (Andy Hertzfeld tells a bit of the backstory to this in “A Mac for Mick” at his Folklore site.)

Tuesday, 23 May 2023

Tickets for The Talk Show Live From WWDC 2023 ★

First batch of tickets is on sale now.

Location: The California Theatre, San Jose
Showtime: Wednesday, 7 June 2023, 5 pm PT (Doors open 4 pm)
Special Guest(s): Yes
Discount Student Ticket Pricing: Available

Video of the show will, of course, be published at the end of the week, but will not be livestreamed. If you want to watch live, be there or be square. I am, I will admit, nervous — I am anything but a natural stage performer — but so very excited to be back in the big theater for the first time in four years. (!) It’s a beautiful space, and I do so enjoy meeting the readers and listeners who attend. The enthusiasm from the audience is always palpable, and so energizing. All year long, as I write and record podcasts, I know I have a big audience out there. But man, when I walk out on stage at the WWDC live show, I can feel it. It’s quite a thing.

I can’t wait to see you there. Should be a good one this year, too.

Adobe Adds AI Generative Fill to Photoshop ★

Pam Clark, writing for the Adobe Blog:

We are thrilled to announce that the Photoshop (beta) app has released Generative Fill, the world’s first co-pilot in creative and design workflows, giving users a magical new way to work. Generative Fill is powered by Adobe Firefly, Adobe’s family of creative generative AI models. Starting today, Photoshop subscribers can create extraordinary imagery from a simple text prompt.

This brings two imaging powerhouses together — Photoshop and generative AI, enabling you to generate content from inside Photoshop with a text prompt and edit it with Photoshop’s comprehensive range of tools to create extraordinary results.

“Extraordinary” is no exaggeration. Just amazing stuff.

See also: This 5-minute video on Adobe’s YouTube channel, and this thread on Twitter from Adobe’s Scott Belsky.

More see also: Rands gets some mind-blowing results in 30 seconds; a mind-blowing 18-minute tour of the feature on YouTube by Aaron Nace at Phlearn.

The Verge: The 5 Biggest Announcements at Microsoft Build 2023 ★

All five items on The Verge’s list are AI-related, topped by an AI-powered personal assistant (named Copilot, natch) built into the Windows 11 task bar.

How many AI announcements will Apple have at WWDC?

CNN Fucked Around With Trump’s Town Hall, Now Finding Out ★

CNN — now owned by Warner “Bros” Discovery, who, as I’ve mentioned, are morons — is learning the same thing as Twitter: there’s no mainstream audience for right-wing media, and no mainstream tolerance for insurrectionists or their sympathizers. Two weeks ago they embarrassed themselves by handing over a prime time hour of TV to Donald Trump. WBD CEO (and Biff-Tannen-in-glasses lookalike) David Zaslav bragged, “Republicans are back on the air.”

Now, reports Justin Baragona at The Daily Beast:

More than a week after CNN’s disastrous town hall with former President Donald Trump, the negative impact the fiasco had on the network’s ratings is coming into clearer focus. Last week, the cable news pioneer suffered its lowest-rated week since June 2015, averaging just 429,000 total daily viewers from Monday-Friday. CNN was also down double digits compared to the same week last year in both total viewership and in the key advertising demographic of viewers ages 25-54. MSNBC more than doubled CNN’s daily audience, drawing 976,000 total viewers, while Fox News averaged 1.4 million. [...]

Since the town hall, CNN has seen several of its weeknight hours — including Anderson Cooper — fall behind Newsmax, the fringe-right channel that has surged since Carlson’s ouster. And on Friday night, the channel’s much-hyped interview show hosted by Chris Wallace averaged only 224,000 total viewers at 10 p.m., drawing 60,000 fewer viewers than Newsmax’s offering.

Losing to Newsmax. Jiminy.

Charlie Warzel: ‘Twitter Is a Far-Right Social Network’ ★

Charlie Warzel, writing for The Atlantic:

Twitter has so fully assumed the role of a far-right platform that it might be killing its competitors. When Parler shut down in April, its parent company noted that “no reasonable person believes that a Twitter clone just for conservatives is a viable business any more.” Left unspoken is the reason: Twitter has become a right-wing echo chamber.

If Musk weren’t too preoccupied lapping up approval from trolls, reactionaries, and Dogecoin enthusiasts — a few of the constituencies left on his site that still seem to adore him — the Parler statement should worry him. Right-wing alt-tech platforms may attract investors and a flood of indignant new users with persecution complexes, but they are, ultimately, bad businesses.

A fairer headline would be “Twitter Is a Far-Right-Friendly Social Network”, but that’s enough to be a problem.

I still check in on Twitter, but with each passing week, less and less. It’s not fun, it’s hard to use without Tweetbot, and the new algorithm that puts paying Twitter Blue users’ replies at the top of every thread has ruined political Twitter. It’s like letting people suffering from incontinence try on all the pants in a store before anyone else.

And the right-wing veer is most obvious in the ads that I see. (And I now see a lot of them — one every 3–4 posts.) Almost all of them are for no-name gimmicks and gadgets, the sort of crap that used to be sold at the mall at Spencer Gifts or in the middle of the night on cable TV commercials.

One of the few exceptions I see is Apple, which continues to place ads on Twitter.

The Talk Show: ‘No False Humidity’ ★

Special guest: Jason Snell. Topics: Headset, headseat, headset. And no baseball talk other than how games might look in VR. Also: Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro for iPad, and GM’s dumb decision to drop CarPlay.

Sponsored by:

• Squarespace: Make your next move. Use code talkshow for 10% off your first order.
• Kolide: Cross-platform endpoint security solution for teams that value privacy and transparency.
• Backblaze: Makes backing up and accessing your data astonishingly easy.

Today Is the Launch of Max, and It Sucks Even More Than I Thought It Would ★

Sigmund Judge, on Twitter:

Max launches today, and with it brings yet another chapter in the battle between Warner/Discovery executives and Apple TV customers.

@StreamOnMax switches away from Apple’s native video player in the continued pursuit of creating an inferior product...

I told you these Warner “Bros” Discovery executives are morons. On all the good platforms, you have to install an altogether new app. Why not just update the existing HBO Max app with (yet another) a new name and icon? Because they’re morons. (Even better: when I launch the old HBO Max app on my Apple TV, it doesn’t tell me anything about the new app — it just shows an error screen saying “Something went wrong.”)

This much moronity I expected. But it gets worse. As Judge documents, with the new app they’ve once again dropped tvOS’s excellent native video player for a custom video player that utterly sucks: “up next” support in the TV app is now broken or missing, HDR and frame-rate match are gone, the new video player doesn’t support the Siri remote’s jog support, no picture-in-picture, and no support for the wonderful “What did they just say?” feature (speak that to your Siri remote and the video jumps back 10 seconds or so and temporarily enables subtitles).

HBO Max was a really good tvOS app. Max is a poor one.

YouTube Pitching Advertisers on Unskippable 30-Second Ads for TV Content ★

Todd Spangler, reporting for Variety:

YouTube’s biggest ad innovation for 2023? It might be borrowing a well-worn page from old-fashioned linear TV.

At the YouTube Brandcast upfront event Wednesday in New York, execs announced the introduction of 30-second unskippable ads in top-performing YouTube content on TVs — you know, just like the commercials that have run on broadcast and cable networks for decades. YouTube also will start testing new “Pause Experiences” for YouTube on TV screens, showing an ad when viewers pause a video akin to the pause ads Hulu first bowed four years ago.

I bring this up on my podcast often, but it never ceases to depress me that 20 years ago, when TV-watching first became computerized through DVRs like TiVo and ReplayTV, one of the primary selling points was the ability to fast-forward through commercials. Computers made watching TV not just a little better, but a lot better. That’s what computers can do. That’s why we love them.

Now though, in the streaming era, more and more we’re seeing streaming apps making commercials unskippable. They’re making TV watching not just worse but a lot worse. That’s also what computers can do. That’s why we hate them.

No surprise which side of this Google is on.

Monday, 22 May 2023

Save the Date: The Talk Show Live From WWDC 2023 ★

Location: The California Theatre, San Jose
Showtime: Wednesday, 7 June 2023, 5:00 pm PT
Tickets: First batch goes on sale Tuesday 23 May
Special Guest(s): For me to know and you to find out
Previous Shows: On YouTube

(Next batch will go on sale later in the week.)

Leaked EU Document Shows Spain Wants to Ban End-to-End Encryption; Other EU Countries Hanging Their Hopes on Impossible Solutions ★

Wired:

Spain has advocated banning encryption for hundreds of millions of people within the European Union, according to a leaked document obtained by Wired that reveals strong support among EU member states for proposals to scan private messages for illegal content.

The document, a European Council survey of member countries’ views on encryption regulation, offered officials’ behind-the-scenes opinions on how to craft a highly controversial law to stop the spread of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) in Europe. The proposed law would require tech companies to scan their platforms, including users’ private messages, to find illegal material. However, the proposal from Ylva Johansson, the EU commissioner in charge of home affairs, has drawn ire from cryptographers, technologists, and privacy advocates for its potential impact on end-to-end encryption. [...]

Of the 20 EU countries represented in the document leaked to WIRED, the majority said they are in favor of some form of scanning of encrypted messages, with Spain’s position emerging as the most extreme. “Ideally, in our view, it would be desirable to legislatively prevent EU-based service providers from implementing end-to-end encryption,” Spanish representatives said in the document.

If the EU goes ahead with this, I think it means the end of services like WhatsApp, Signal, and iMessage in the EU. There’s no way to architect a messaging system that uses E2EE in some regions and doesn’t in others. The only way to comply would be to rearchitect these systems to not use E2EE anywhere. Signal certainly wouldn’t do that. Apple wouldn’t either.

Denmark and Ireland expressed support for scanning encrypted messengers for child sexual abuse material while also endorsing the inclusion of wording in the law that protects end-to-end encryption from being weakened. The ability to do this would rely on the invention of technology that can scan encrypted messages for illegal content without altering or breaking the security features offered by encryption — a feat cryptographers and cybersecurity experts have said is technically impossible.

It is technically impossible. There is no he-said/she-said debate here. The cryptographers are correct and the lawmakers are so ignorant that they’re proposing a fantasy. It’s a downwind effect of Arthur C. Clarke’s famous maxim that sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic: the technology of E2EE is so far above the heads of lawmakers and law enforcement officials that they feel free to demand magic solutions. “Just nerd harder.”

The Netherlands, however, stated that this would be possible through “on-device” scanning before the illegal material is encrypted and sent to its recipient. “There are … technologies which may allow for automatic detection of CSAM while at the same time leaving end-to-end encryption intact,” the country’s representatives stated in the document.

Somewhere in Cupertino, a head bangs against a desk.

Facebook Fined $1.3 Billion for Violating EU Data Privacy Rules ★

Adam Satariano, reporting for The New York Times:

Meta on Monday was fined a record 1.2 billion euros ($1.3 billion) and ordered to stop transferring data collected from Facebook users in Europe to the United States, in a major ruling against the social media company for violating European Union data protection rules.

The penalty, announced by Ireland’s Data Protection Commission, is potentially one of the most consequential in the five years since the European Union enacted the landmark data privacy law known as the General Data Protection Regulation. Regulators said the company failed to comply with a 2020 decision by the European Union’s highest court that Facebook data shipped across the Atlantic was not sufficiently protected from American spy agencies.

But it remains unclear if or when Meta will ever need to cordon off the data of Facebook users in Europe. Meta said it would appeal the decision, setting up a potentially lengthy legal process.

A billion here, a billion there, and soon enough you’re talking about real money.

Neeva, Upstart Search Engine, Shuts Down ★

Sridhar Ramaswamy and Vivek Raghunathan, writing on the Neeva blog:

In early 2022, the upcoming impact of generative AI and LLMs became clear to us. We embarked on an ambitious effort to seamlessly blend LLMs into our search stack. We rallied the Neeva team around the vision to create an answer engine. We are proud of being the first search engine to provide cited, real-time AI answers to a majority of queries early this year.

But throughout this journey, we’ve discovered that it is one thing to build a search engine, and an entirely different thing to convince regular users of the need to switch to a better choice. From the unnecessary friction required to change default search settings, to the challenges in helping people understand the difference between a search engine and a browser, acquiring users has been really hard. Contrary to popular belief, convincing users to pay for a better experience was actually a less difficult problem compared to getting them to try a new search engine in the first place.

I tried Neeva, briefly, but it never stuck for me. Part of the problem, even if you’re open to trying new search engines — clearly a big if — is that there’s a bit of a renaissance at the moment in new search engines. I’d been using DuckDuckGo as my default for years, but about six months ago I switched to Kagi, and so far I haven’t looked back. I pay $10/month for Kagi. A paid search engine! Good search results and absolutely zero clutter from ads or paid placement. They’ve also got a GPT-backed search that includes up-to-date results and works very fast.

A Twitter Bug Is Restoring ‘Deleted’ Tweets and Retweets ★

James Vincent, writing at The Verge:

Earlier this year on the 8th of May I deleted all my tweets, just under 5,000 of them. I know the exact day because I tweeted about it.

This morning, though, I discovered that Twitter has restored a handful of my old re-tweets; interactions I know I scrubbed from my profile. Those re-tweets were gone. I remember surveying my bare timeline with satisfaction before thinking, “great, time to draw attention to myself.” But now they’re back. You can see them by scrolling down my timeline past May 8th, with even more appearing if you select “tweets with replies.”

Twitter is far from alone being a service where “deletion” needs dick quotes around it. This bug is bad and likely will soon be fixed, but the persistence of ostensibly deleted tweets is a profound design flaw.

(The nightmare scenario: a bug that exposes DMs — which infamously are not encrypted — publicly.)

Leaks Regarding Instagram’s Purportedly Imminent Twitter-Like App ★

Lia Haberman, writing at ICYMI:

Codename: P92, Project 92 or Barcelona, as it’s been alternately called.

Tagline: “Instagram for your thoughts.”

All new details have surfaced based on secret calls Meta has been having with select creators, hinting at a potential release in late June. Here’s what I’ve been told by a creator who met with Meta.

The decentralized app is built on the back of Instagram but will be compatible with some other apps like Mastodon:

• There’s a single sign-on with your IG username and password
• You can sync up with your existing followers
• Your handle, bio and even verification will carry over from IG
• Users on other apps will be able search for, follow and interact with your profile and content

Sounds like it’s ActivityPub-compatible, which is how it will be possible to federate with Mastodon instances.

Recommended: ‘Chimp Empire’ ★

Chimp Empire is a four-part (an hour-ish each) documentary about two rival chimpanzee groups in Uganda. It’s one of the best, most enjoyable, most engaging, and most informative cinematic experiences I’ve ever had. My wife and I devoured it. It’s extraordinarily beautiful and compelling. It’s a story about two warring groups, replete with interesting characters and compelling drama. Scheming, backstabbing, loyalty, social climbing, bravery, cowardice. It’s all there.

The question my wife and I kept asking ourselves was, How the hell did they capture this remarkable footage? It couldn’t be fake, but it seemed utterly impossible how close the camera crews got to the chimps — including while the two tribes fight. Netflix has a behind-the-scenes video and story that explains how this was even possible:

While it would normally be impossible to capture the intimacy of warring chimps in the wild, the filmmakers benefited from an environment long marked by human activity — thanks to a constant swarm of researchers. “It took 25 years to reach the point where we can walk out and be near the chimps. We’re humans, so the chimps just see us as an extension of the presence that’s been in the forest for years,” Reed told Netflix.

This familiarity allowed the camera crew to capture Chimp Empire’s most stunning scenes. But up-close encounters were still just as bizarre as you might expect.

“I remember suddenly being aware that the Ngogo chimps were all around. It’s like being on The Truman Show or something — you feel like you’re on a set, because you can’t quite believe they’re real,” Reed said. “They’re so human, you know that they’re assessing you in the same way that you’re assessing them. You can’t quite believe that they accept you into their world. You go where they go, but they make all the decisions. The only thing you can control is where you turn your cameras, or whether you keep up with the action. It’s quite humbling, and I quite like it. The only thing you can do is put yourself in the best position possible to record what they’re doing.”

If you’ve got Netflix, start watching Chimp Empire tonight. If you don’t have Netflix, sign up for a month just to get Chimp Empire. Just watch it first, then read the behind-the-scenes stuff.

In Transition to Micro-LED, Apple Is Attempting to Reduce Its Reliance on Samsung for Displays ★

Lauly Li, reporting for Nikkei Asia:

Apple is getting involved in the mass production of next-generation displays to lessen its reliance on rival Samsung and increase its own control over the supply of a key component, Nikkei Asia has learned. Taking a hands-on approach to production is a stark contrast to the iPhone maker’s usual approach of providing display makers with screen specifications and leaving the actual production to them. [...]

Displays are one of the most expensive components in all of Apple’s devices. Since the American company first introduced OLED displays on its iPhone in 2017, its reliance on Samsung Display for the screens has only grown. To reduce that dependence and gain price-bargaining power, Apple tried to bring in other suppliers, namely LG Display and China’s display champion BOE Technology, but they lag the South Korean leader in terms of technology and quality stability, according to multiple sources familiar with the situation.

“Apple has spent at least $1 billion on the R&D and samples for micro-LED technologies in the past nearly 10 years,” said one of the people who has been directly involved in the project for years. “It wants to secure more control over the next-gen display technologies for its future products.”

Apple’s relationship with Samsung is one of the most interesting in all of tech. On the consumer side, Samsung has been Apple’s only serious rival for high-end phones for almost the entirety of the smartphone era. But for certain chips and especially displays, Samsung has been one of Apple’s most essential suppliers. So I think it’s quite obvious why Apple would try to take display development into its own hands. Imagine if Apple had a display technology lead analogous to its performance-per-watt chip technology lead.

From the Cook Doctrine: “We believe that we need to own and control the primary technologies behind the products we make, and participate only in markets where we can make a significant contribution.”

(I’ve also long wondered how much effort Apple is putting into developing its own camera sensors.)

Sunday, 21 May 2023

Onin ★

My thanks to Onin for sponsoring last week at DF. Onin is a free iPhone keyboard app that puts your calendar right in your keyboard. Or is it a calendar app that adds a keyboard? Whichever way you want to look at it, it’s a very clever idea. Most people only add a fraction of their events they work out in a messaging app in their calendar. With Onin, you can check your availability, add new events, and even share invites — right inside any app where you use the keyboard. It works with all your existing calendars (after granting it access), in all your apps, and is end-to-end encrypted.

It’s free and fun — I say check it out.

---

---

Thursday, 18 May 2023

‘Die of Boils, Mr. Sparky Car’ ★

Back in November, David Simon left Twitter and signed off with this exquisite essay:

I know there are many who found neither decorum nor dignity in the blunt ugliness of what for me was very much a bit of decade-long performance art. There I was in the gutter, trading spit and flinging sewage. Well, yes, but it was fun. And if you came correct, we could argue, perhaps even laugh, as many new friends came to understand. But if you came to play, we played. I’m from Baltimore, where The Dozens are an American cultural artform like any other.

An aggrieved bystander once called the act graceless. I readily agreed:

“This is Twitter. There is no grace. None. Here in an orgy of organized disinformation and trollery, our republic has come to die. There is no teaching the fuckmooks and deplorati. Go down swinging. Use every cruel word. Invoke their mothers. Lather them with contempt. Enjoy.”

In need of an outlet while the WGA strike continues, he’s back. (And hell yeah I just invoked “Learn Spelling” on trollery, deplorati, and especially fuckmooks.)

Mark Gurman Recaps His Reporting on Apple’s Upcoming XR Headset and He’s Sticking With the Front-Facing Display for Googly Eyes ★

Mark Gurman, reporting for Bloomberg:^*

Other key figures in Apple’s top ranks, such as Craig Federighi, senior vice president for software engineering, have also kept their distance and seemed wary of the headset, according to people familiar with the project. Johny Srouji, Apple’s senior vice president for hardware technologies, has privately been a skeptic, likening it to a science project. Internally he’s warned that building the high-performing chips needed for the device could distract from new iPhone chips, which would probably drive more revenue.

That’s some legitimately juicy gossip. But I’m not sure how Federighi, the head of all software at Apple, could keep any distance at all from Apple’s first major new software platform since the iPhone.

Srouji’s group did end up developing some of Apple’s most advanced chips to date for the headset, while iPhone speed gains have indeed slowed in recent years.

Well of course Srouji’s group developed advanced chips for the headset. Where else would the chips come from? “Well Tim, Johny is skeptical about this project, so I guess we’ll commission all the custom silicon designs from Qualcomm.”

And comparing benchmark results for iPhones vs. Android phones, I’d love to know what speed gains have slowed. It seems like nonsense to me. If anything, Apple’s A-series chips are further ahead of the competition than ever in both raw performance and performance-per-watt.

In an attempt to keep headset wearers engaged with the real world, the device will have an outward-facing display showing their eye movements and facial expressions. Apple regards this feature as a key differentiator from enclosed VR headsets. One person familiar with the device says the exterior screens allow people to interact with a headset wearer without feeling as if they’re talking to a robot.

I’ll buy this front-facing display rumor if there’s a Cylon mode.

Otherwise I’ll stick with my previous understanding that this is an internal joke that has been taken as real; that it would look goofy, not humane; and that even if it didn’t look goofy, it would make no sense to add the financial cost of an outward-facing display to an already-expensive device, and even less sense to incur the battery-life drain of powering that external display on an already-battery-life-constrained device.

OpenAI Releases ChatGPT App for iOS ★

OpenAI, in a postscript to their iOS app announcement:

P.S. Android users, you’re next! ChatGPT will be coming to your devices soon.

Are Android users next, or are they last? Is there anyone else in line?

Anyway, I guess Fred Wilson isn’t an advisor to OpenAI?

---

---

Thursday, 18 May 2023

New EU Cryptocurrency Rules Make Exchanges Liable If They Lose Customers’ Assets ★

Ashley Belanger, reporting for Ars Technica:

Today, the European Union approved a comprehensive set of cryptocurrency regulations seeking to lay the groundwork for how crypto is regulated globally. The rules — which make providers liable if they lose investors’ crypto assets — will go into effect in 2024 across 27 EU member states.

The EU’s muscular regulation regime finally lands on a worthwhile target.

---

---

Thursday, 18 May 2023

CNBC: ‘Google to Save Money on Employee Laptops, Services, and Staplers’ ★

Jennifer Elias, reporting for CNBC back in early April (sorry — I’m cleaning up old open tabs):

Among the equipment changes, Google is pausing refreshes for laptops, desktop PCs and monitors. It’s also “changing how often equipment is replaced,” according to internal documents viewed by CNBC.

Google employees who are not in engineering roles but require a new laptop will receive a Chromebook by default. Chromebooks are laptops made by Google and use a Google-based operating system called Chrome OS.

It’s a shift from the range of offerings, such as Apple MacBooks, that were previously available to employees. “It also provides the best opportunity across all of our managed devices to prevent external compromise,” one document about the laptop changes said.

Google has this backwards. They should force all their engineers to use Chromebooks, and let everyone else continue using MacBooks. Maybe then they’ll turn ChromeOS into something useable for real work.

Google employees have also noticed some more extreme cutbacks to office supplies in recent weeks. Staplers and tape are no longer being provided to print stations companywide as “part of a cost effectiveness initiative,” according to a separate, internal facilities directive viewed by CNBC.

“We have been asked to pull all tape/dispensers throughout the building,” a San Francisco facility directive stated. “If you need a stapler or tape, the receptionist desk has them to borrow.”

A Google spokesperson said the internal message about staplers and tape was misinformed. “Staplers and tape continue to be provided to print stations. Any internal messages that claim otherwise are misinformed.″

Please tell me they haven’t dismantled the slides.

Disney Pulls Plug on $1 Billion Development in Florida ★

Brooks Barnes, reporting for The New York Times:

In March, Disney called Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida “anti-business” for his scorched-earth attempt to tighten oversight of the company’s theme park resort near Orlando. Last month, when Disney sued the governor and his allies for what it called “a targeted campaign of government retaliation,” the company made clear that $17 billion in planned investment in Walt Disney World was on the line.

“Does the state want us to invest more, employ more people, and pay more taxes, or not?” Robert A. Iger, Disney’s chief executive, said on an earnings-related conference call with analysts last week.

On Thursday, Mr. Iger and Josh D’Amaro, Disney’s theme park and consumer products chairman, showed that they were not bluffing, pulling the plug on a nearly $1 billion office complex that was scheduled for construction in Orlando. It would have brought more than 2,000 jobs to the region, with $120,000 as the average salary, according to an estimate from the Florida Department of Economic Opportunity.

Vote for Republicans, they’re good for business.

Wednesday, 17 May 2023

Porsche Adds Support for Apple Maps EV Routing ★

Chance Miller, 9to5Mac:

Porsche is signing on to be the second EV maker to officially adopt support for EV routing in Apple Maps. This means that Porsche Taycan drivers can now use Apple Maps via CarPlay, signaling Porsche’s continued commitment to CarPlay as other automakers abandon Apple’s platform.

It’s not other automakers plural. It’s just one: GM.

But I’m sure GM knows better than Porsche.

---

---