By John Gruber

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William Friedkin Dies at 87 ★

William Grimes, writing for The New York Times:

William Friedkin, a filmmaker whose gritty, visceral style and fascination with characters on the edge helped make “The French Connection” and “The Exorcist” two of the biggest box-office hits of the 1970s, died on Monday at his home in the Bel Air neighborhood of Los Angeles. He was 87.

The cause was heart failure and pneumonia, said his wife, Sherry Lansing, the former head of Paramount Pictures in Hollywood. His death came just weeks before the release of his most recent directorial effort, “The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial,” a movie based on the Herman Wouk play.

Amongst his lesser-known films, Sorcerer is an absolute gem: riveting, visceral, and gritty.

Callsheet 1.0 ★

Casey Liss:

When I watch a movie or TV show, I’m constantly trying to figure out who that actor is, who the director is, and so on. Early this year, I wanted a way to look this up that was native to iOS/iPadOS, but also fast, with no fluff that I wasn’t interested in. I wanted a bespoke version of the IMDB app.

So I wrote it. It’s called Callsheet, and I’d love for you to try it. Callsheet is a subscription-based app, but all subscription plans have a one-week free trial. Additionally, your first twenty searches are free, before you’re compelled to subscribe.

A few years ago I switched from IMDB to The Movie Database (TMDB) for my movie/TV lookups. IMDB, once great, is now laden with obtrusive ads to an extent that is user-hostile. But I’d been vaguely wishing that there were a top-notch native iPhone TMDB app. Callsheet is that app. I’ve been beta-testing it for months, and ever since, Callsheet has been one of the few apps I use almost daily. Super-useful, super-convenient.

Sunday, 6 August 2023

Warp ★

My thanks to Warp for sponsoring last week at DF. Warp is a blazingly fast, Rust-based terminal reimagined from the ground up to work like a modern app. A lot of “modern” terminal apps just offer ways to make your windows look cool — colors, transparency, stuff like that. Warp offers all of that in spades — it’s a very cool-looking terminal. But Warp is highly innovative in functional ways too. Even if you don’t care at all how your terminal looks, Warp is definitely worth checking out.

Warp lets you edit your commands like in an IDE, with selections, auto-suggestions, and completion menus. Generate commands from natural language using AI so you don’t have to context switch to Google (or whatever your preferred search engine is) anymore. Navigate through your terminal output command-by-command instead of scrolling through a wall of text.

And with the newly released Warp Drive, there’s a secure place to save your commands as workflows so you can annotate, share, and execute them on-demand.

Warp works with bash, zsh, and fish (my favorite shell) and requires zero config. You can just download it and start using it. It’s been my go-to terminal app for over a year now.

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Saturday, 5 August 2023

Android Spyware Maker LetMeSpy Shuts Down After Hacker Deletes Server Data ★

Zack Whittaker, reporting for TechCrunch:

Poland-based spyware LetMeSpy is no longer operational and said it will shut down after a June data breach wiped out its servers, including its huge trove of data stolen from thousands of victims’ phones. [...]

LetMeSpy was an Android phone monitoring app that was purposefully designed to stay hidden on a victim’s phone home screen, making the app difficult to detect and remove. When planted on a person’s phone — often by someone with knowledge of their phone passcode — apps like LetMeSpy continually steal that person’s messages, call logs and real-time location data.

A copy of the database was obtained by nonprofit transparency collective DDoSecrets, which indexes leaked datasets in the public interest, and shared with TechCrunch for analysis. The data showed that LetMeSpy, until recently, had been used to steal data from more than 13,000 compromised Android devices worldwide, though LetMeSpy’s website claimed prior to the breach that it controlled more than 236,000 devices.

The database also contained information that shows the spyware was developed by a Krakow-based tech company called Radeal, whose chief executive Rafal Lidwin did not respond to a request for comment. LetMeSpy is the latest spyware operation to shut down in the past year in the wake of a security incident that exposed victims’ data, but also the identities of its real-world operators.

Like cockroaches scurrying when the lights come on.

Where’s My Fainting Couch? ★

Richard Lawler, reporting for The Verge:

In news that isn’t very surprising given the recent history of Twitter, which Elon Musk is currently rebranding to X, the company won’t be able to make some promised payments on time. The X Support account says that because its “Ads Revenue Sharing” program is so popular, “We need a bit more time to review everything for the next payout and aim to get all eligible accounts paid as soon as possible.”

Related: Jeremy Vaught registered the @music account on Twitter 16 years ago, and had posted to it frequently. He is a paying Twitter Blue subscriber. And X Corp just took the handle from him, like they did to the guy who had @x. This company is a great and trustworthy partner for individual creators.

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Thursday, 3 August 2023

Apple Q3 2023 Results ★

Jason Snell, Six Colors:

Apple announced its results for its fiscal third quarter on Thursday. As expected, it was a down quarter — though at a 1% drop over the year-ago quarter, it’s a better result than the previous quarter, which was down 3% year-over-year. The company reported $81.8B in revenue and $19.9B in profit.

The three key hardware categories were all down year-over-year: Mac was down 7%, iPad was down 20%, and the all-important iPhone was down 2%. Things were a little different in the two portions of Apple’s business that have shown indefatigable growth in recent years: Services revenue was up 8% and the Wearables, Home, and Accessories category was up 2%.

In a press release accompanying the results, Apple CFO Luca Maestri trumpeted that it has broken the billion paid subscriptions barrier.

No big surprises. Still lots of switchers coming to iPhone and Mac, and a lot of first-time iPad buyers. That, to me, is a healthy pulse check.

Apple Card’s Savings Account Reached $10 Billion in Deposits ★

Apple Newsroom:

Today, Apple announced that Apple Card’s high-yield Savings account offered by Goldman Sachs has reached over $10 billion in deposits from users since launching in April. Savings enables Apple Card users to grow their Daily Cash rewards with a Savings account from Goldman Sachs, which offers a high-yield APY of 4.15 percent.

Last week, in The Information:

As of earlier this year, the Apple Card had roughly 10 million users, according to a person with direct knowledge of the figure, which hasn’t been previously reported.

That works out to a nice even $1,000 average per Apple Card user. I’m guessing though, that the median is much lower, and the mean average is $1,000 because a smaller number of users have transferred large amounts to take advantage of the 4.15 percent interest rate. (I currently get 3.93 percent from TD Bank, so I just use my Apple Card savings account for my cash back rewards.)

Apple Watch Ultra 2 to Be Available in Dark Titanium, Says Leaker ★

Leaker ShrimpApplePro, on Twitter/X:^*

Apple Watch Ultra 2. Same design. And I can confirm this year we will have the black titanium this year along with the current standard titanium.

Yours truly, reviewing the Apple Watch Ultra last year:

I don’t own the silver link bracelet to try it, but I suspect it doesn’t play paired with the Ultra. Brushed stainless steel and titanium are too different to be considered a match, but too similar to have deliberate contrast. I wish Apple were committed enough to the Link Bracelet to make a new one in titanium to match the case of the Ultra. (I also hope that future generations of Apple Watch Ultra are available with a space gray or black coating.)

The last Apple Watch I bought for myself was a Series 7 in space black titanium. Given that the original Ultra was a hit, it seems like a no-brainer to offer it in a dark option this year. I think the biggest logistical complication for Apple with this is that it will multiply the number of Ultra straps they need to offer — the Alpine Loop and Trail Loop bands have titanium fixtures that ought to match the watch case, and ideally, they’d color match the buckle hardware on the elastomer Ocean Bands too. But there’s a reason they put the COO in charge of Apple Watch.

One question I have: is the Action button going to remain orange, or is that color going to change each year? I’m hoping it stays orange. (The orange hints on Vision Pro’s head strap suggest the color is more than a seasonal fad.)

(Via MacRumors.)

* I’ll drop the “Twitter” when twitter.com starts redirecting to x.com, and not the other way around. Even with the slapdash way they’ve enacted this name change, you’d think that would’ve happened by now. Must be a complicated mess behind the scenes.

Wednesday, 2 August 2023

Arc 1.0 ★

Upstart web browser Arc, which remains exclusive to the Mac for now, is out of beta. I find Arc hard to explain in a nutshell, and personally, it’s not for me. But I’ve got some friends who really dig it, and I can see why. It’s a rethinking of how a web browser should look and work. It’s less like a traditional browser and more like a virtual environment/platform unto itself, where tabs are more like apps inside a parent Arc window.

The reason it doesn’t resonate with me is that I’m both deeply accustomed to and really like Safari. But if you find yourself dissatisfied with Safari and other traditional browsers like Chrome, you should definitely give Arc a look. It’s clever and ambitious. Ultimately they’re a company that’s just trying to make a really great, novel web browser for power users. I even love the name of the company: The Browser Company of New York.

Flighty 3.0 ★

Sarah Perez, writing for TechCrunch last week:

With today’s launch of Flighty 3.0, users will have a new way of sharing their flight information with trusted others, without having to rely on forwarding airline confirmation emails or sending texts.

Instead, Flighty is introducing the concept of “Flighty Friends,” a way to track loved ones’ flight details automatically. The concept builds on the friends’ flights feature already available in previous versions of Flighty, which allowed users to share their live flight information with others through the app.

Now, users can connect directly with one another in Flighty — similar to how you would “friend” someone on a social network. Afterward, the connected users would receive updates about their family members’ or friends’ flights on an ongoing basis. The app’s notifications would then read something like “mom has landed,” instead of just noting a flight number has landed, and would include the user’s profile photo.

Terrific update to one of my very favorite iOS apps. We don’t fly a ton, but my family flies often enough that Flighty’s $89/year family plan feels like a bargain. It’s just $49/year for a single-user account. Everything about Flighty is just so nice, and so convenient. Its Live Activities widget is so well done that Apple featured Flighty in the WWDC keynote, and gave it an Apple Design Award this year.

Last year I had a flight get cancelled about an hour before it was supposed to start boarding. I got an alert from Flighty, immediately dashed over to the nearest gate agent, and got rebooked on another flight before American Airlines notified me that the original flight had been cancelled.

Back in January I wrote about the vast discrepancy between best-of-breed apps on iOS compared to Android, using Mastodon clients as an example. Flighty is another such exemplar. It’s exclusive to iOS and MacOS, and there’s simply nothing close to it on Android. Flighty’s free mode is quite useful too, and you get access to Flighty Pro free of charge for your first flight.

See also: Gunnar Olson writing for Thrifty Traveler, and
Dawn Gilbertson writing for the WSJ.

Tuesday, 1 August 2023

Donald Trump Indicted Over Efforts to Overturn 2020 Election ★

The New York Times:

Former President Donald J. Trump was indicted on Tuesday in connection with his widespread efforts to overturn the 2020 election following a sprawling federal investigation into his attempts to cling to power after losing the presidency to Joseph R. Biden Jr.

The indictment was filed by the special counsel Jack Smith in Federal District Court in Washington. It accuses Mr. Trump of three conspiracies: one to defraud the United States, a second to obstruct an official government proceeding and a third to deprive people of civil rights provided by federal law or the Constitution.

Can you even believe it? Well, other than the fact that we watched him do all of this live on television, repeatedly over the course of his final months in office, can you believe it? Read the full indictment here. It opens thus:

The Defendant, DONALD J. TRUMP, was the forty-fifth President of the United States and a candidate for re-election in 2020. The Defendant lost the 2020 presidential election.

The indictment, poetically, is 45 pages long.

Reed Jobs Starts VC Fund Focused on Cancer Treatments ★

DealBook at The New York Times:

Reed Jobs is stepping into the spotlight: The 31-year-old son of Steve Jobs and Laurene Powell Jobs is starting a venture capital firm to invest in new cancer treatments, DealBook is the first to report. It’s an area that hits close to home, since his father, the iconic Apple co-founder, died from complications of pancreatic cancer in 2011.

“My father got diagnosed with cancer when I was 12,” Mr. Jobs told DealBook’s Andrew Ross Sorkin in his first interview with a news organization. That led him to begin focusing on oncology, starting with a summer internship at Stanford when he was 15.

Pixar, Adobe, Apple, Autodesk, and Nvidia Form Alliance for OpenUSD ★

Apple Newsroom:

Pixar, Adobe, Apple, Autodesk, and NVIDIA, together with the Joint Development Foundation (JDF), an affiliate of the Linux Foundation, today announced the Alliance for OpenUSD (AOUSD) to promote the standardization, development, evolution, and growth of Pixar’s Universal Scene Description technology. [...]

Created by Pixar Animation Studios, OpenUSD is a high-performance 3D scene description technology that offers robust interoperability across tools, data, and workflows. Already known for its ability to collaboratively capture artistic expression and streamline cinematic content production, OpenUSD’s power and flexibility make it an ideal content platform to embrace the needs of new industries and applications.

The alliance will develop written specifications detailing the features of OpenUSD. This will enable greater compatibility and wider adoption, integration, and implementation, and allows inclusion by other standards bodies into their specifications. The Linux Foundation’s JDF was chosen to house the project, as it will enable open, efficient, and effective development of OpenUSD specifications, while providing a path to recognition through the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).

Conspicuously absent: Meta, which supposedly has bet its future on XR. (Likewise the word metaverse.)

I suspect some people will be surprised by Apple’s inclusion, thinking that Apple is only interested in proprietary technology. But that’s not the case. Apple’s interests tend to be at both ends of the proprietary spectrum, and the company has historically embraced open content/file formats in particular. A huge part of the original iPhone’s appeal was its groundbreaking support for the full web (as opposed to, as Steve Jobs called it, the “baby web” supported by mobile devices of the time). Nvidia executives have repeatedly made the analogy that USD is to 3D content what HTML is to 2D.

Four Score and Seven Likes Ago ★

Aisha Malik at TechCrunch:

Meta is gearing up to roll out AI-powered chatbots with different personas as early as next month, according to a new report from the Financial Times. The chatbots are designed to have humanlike conversations with users on Meta’s social media platforms, including Facebook and Instagram.

The report indicates that these chatbots will take on different personas, including one that advises users on travel plans in the style of a surfer and another that speaks like Abraham Lincoln. The new chatbots could launch as early as next month. Meta reportedly sees the move as a way to boost engagement with its social platforms.

It’s always Lincoln.

The Talk Show: ‘What’s Happening‽’ ★

Craig Hockenberry, the special guest with the special fleshy palms, returns to the show. Topics include Twitter/X, foldable phones, and our favorite features in iOS 17 now that it’s in public beta.

Sponsored by:

• Backblaze: Backblaze makes backing up and accessing your data astonishingly easy.
• Squarespace: Make your next move. Use code talkshow for 10% off your first order.

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Monday, 31 July 2023

Inside Meta’s Threads Launch ★

Naomi Nix and Will Oremus, reporting for The Washington Post:

With a mandate from Zuckerberg to take a big risk, Mosseri assembled a lean, engineer-heavy team of fewer than 60 people to hack together a bare-bones app on a breakneck timetable more reminiscent of a start-up than an entrenched tech giant. Speaking to investors this week after Meta reported strong earnings, Zuckerberg held up Threads as vindication of his “year of efficiency,” in which he sheared tens of thousands of jobs in a bid for more agile teams that would ship products quickly.

That Threads was created by such a small group in such a short amount of time has become something of a marvel inside Meta, according to current and former employees who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters, as well as private messages viewed by The Post. Many see its quick rise as a reminder that well-executed product launches might not need all the bureaucratic trappings that a company with some 66,000 employees had grown accustomed to.

“Quick execution. Nothing fancy,” one person wrote on Blind, an anonymous workplace app. “Just solid engineering that most of our ICs [individual contributors] can do but unfortunately are shackled.”

It continues to astound me that anyone with any experience whatsoever would express surprise that a small-ish talented team was so effective. (I say “ish” because 50-60 people isn’t all that small.) Fred Brooks’s The Mythical Man-Month is somehow simultaneously famous and widely-ignored. A larger team would likely have delayed Threads, not accelerated its launch. A much larger team might have doomed the project to failure.

To keep things moving, the Threads team punted thorny decisions and eschewed difficult features, including private messages and the ability to search for content or view the feeds of people you don’t follow. The company also opted not to launch in the European Union, where regulators are preparing to enforce new rules next year requiring tech companies to provide more information to regulators about their algorithms.

“You do the simple thing first,” Mosseri said. “And I think that also helps reduce the scope, because often what happens is scope creep and you want to add all these things because they’re all great.”

Get something good out, even if it’s missing obvious important features, and start iterating. That’s the recipe. I’m very curious what the story is going to be for private messages on Threads, though — yet another new messaging silo, or something tied to Instagram’s? Whatever it is, I sure hope it uses E2EE.

(Twitter DMs, infamously, do not use E2EE, so every single ostensibly private message ever sent on Twitter is readable by Twitter employees with access privileges, and thus potentially exposable to the public by either a bug or spite. The same goes for Mastodon, which offers “mentioned people only” messaging, a feature that should not exist, in my opinion, because it creates the illusion of privacy. Better to offer no private messaging at all than offer it without E2EE.)

Research Suggests Facebook’s Algorithm Is ‘Influential’ but Doesn’t Necessarily Change Beliefs ★

Mike Isaac and Sheera Frenkel, reporting last week for The New York Times:

In the papers, researchers from the University of Texas, New York University, Princeton and other institutions found that removing some key functions of the social platforms’ algorithms had “no measurable effects” on people’s political beliefs. In one experiment on Facebook’s algorithm, people’s knowledge of political news declined when their ability to reshare posts was removed, the researchers said.

At the same time, the consumption of political news on Facebook and Instagram was highly segregated by ideology, according to another study. More than 97 percent of the links to news stories rated as false by fact checkers on the apps during the 2020 election drew more conservative readers than liberal readers, the research found. [...] Still, the proportion of false news articles that Facebook users read was low compared with all news articles viewed, researchers said.

False news articles were low overall, but the articles deemed false were overwhelming consumed by conservatives. That’s no surprise, but to me, gets to the heart of the controversy. A hypothetical social media algorithm that promotes true stories and suppresses false ones, with perfect accuracy, is going to be accused by conservatives of being biased against conservatives, because conservatives are drawn to false stories.

Jeff Horwitz, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (News+ link), on Facebook overstating the degree to which these new studies exonerate its platforms’ influence:

Science warned Meta earlier this week that it would publicly dispute an assertion that the published studies should be read as largely exonerating Meta of a contributing role in societal divisions, said Meagan Phelan, who oversees the communication of Science’s findings.

“The findings of the research suggest Meta algorithms are an important part of what is keeping people divided,” Phelan told Meta’s communications team on Monday, according to an excerpt of her message she shared with The Wall Street Journal. She added that one of the studies found that “compared to liberals, politically conservative users were far more siloed in their news sources, driven in part by algorithmic processes, and especially apparent on Facebook’s Pages and Groups.”

Update: Kai Kupferschmidt’s summary of the four studies for Science.

Twitter Finally Turns to ‘X’ in App Store Listing ★

Tim Hardwick, reporting for MacRumors:

X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, has updated its official app on Apple’s App Store to conform with the new branding that was announced last weekend by billionaire owner Elon Musk. Instead of “Let’s talk” — Twitter’s original tagline — “Blaze your glory!” is the curious subtitle on X’s iOS App Store listing, which describes the app as “the trusted digital town square for everyone.”

You know how people in the South use “Bless your heart” derisively? Well, now we have such a phrase for Musk’s shenanigans.

Anyway, it would appear that getting this single-character name in their App Store listing required an exemption from Apple. Blaze their glory, I say.

Counterpoint Says U.S. Smartphone Sales Are Down, But Mostly on the Android Side ★

Matthew Orf, writing for Counterpoint Research:

US smartphone shipments declined 24% YoY in Q2 2023, according to Counterpoint Research’s Market Monitor data. This was the third consecutive quarter of YoY declines. Android brands like Samsung, Motorola and TCL-Alcatel saw the steepest declines in shipments, while Apple’s shipments were more resilient. As a result, Apple’s share of shipments increased YoY.

Android smartphone shipments declined 38% while Apple shipments fell 6% YoY.

Samsung’s sales — according to Counterpoint — were exactly in line with Android overall, down 37 percent overall. You’d think they’d be up, not down, with all those foldables they sell. Another interesting tidbit: Counterpoint claims Google Pixel sales are up 48 percent year-over-year. If true, maybe, finally, Pixels are starting to get traction? I have to give Google credit for doggedly sticking with it.

Apple’s share of shipments in Counterpoint’s tallying has been 50+ percent for 4 consecutive quarters.

Kolide ★

My thanks to Kolide for sponsoring last week at DF. Getting OS updates installed on end user devices should be easy. After all, it’s one of the simplest yet most impactful ways that every employee can practice good security. On top of that, every MDM solution promises that it will automate the process and install updates with no user interaction needed. Yet in the real world, it doesn’t play out like that. Users don’t install updates and IT admins won’t force installs via forced restart.

With Kolide, when a user’s device — be it Mac, Windows, Linux, or mobile — is out of compliance, Kolide reaches out to them with instructions on how to fix it. The user chooses when to restart, but if they don’t fix the problem by a predetermined deadline, they’re unable to authenticate with Okta.

Watch Kolide’s on-demand demo to learn more about how it enforces device compliance for companies with Okta.

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Friday, 28 July 2023

X Corp Has Updated Their Mobile Apps, Finally, But the iOS App Is Still ‘Twitter’ in the App Store ★

Any normal company planning a product name change would have everything sorted out with the iOS App Store and Android Play Store ahead of time. Needless to say, X Corp is not a normal company and so of course they didn’t have anything sorted out. Yesterday an update to the Twitter app appeared in Google’s Play Store, with a new icon and new app name: “X”.

Today, an update to the Twitter app finally appeared on Apple’s App Store. It has the new icon, but the app’s name in the store is still “Twitter”. The app’s description calls it X, though:

The X app is the trusted digital town square for everyone.

And the name of the app installed on your device is “X”. What gives? On Twitter X, Nick Sheriff points to a rule I heretofore wasn’t aware of. Apple doesn’t allow single-character app names:

On iOS, the situation is distinct as Apple does not permit any app to have a single character as their app name.

If they manage to obtain approval, it would mark the first instance since the inception of the iOS App Store that such a permission has been granted.

The rule Sheriff is referencing is about an app’s title in the App Store, not the name of the app as it appears on your device. So who’s going to budge? Will Apple grant a unique exemption allowing X Corp to have the first and only single-character app name in the entire App Store, or will X name the iOS app something longer (X App? X: Everything? X 69? XXX? 𝕏 (💦✊🍆)?)

Update: I’ve rewritten this post significantly. I was confused, at first, by the different rules for app names (on device) and app titles (listed on the App Store). It’s the App Store listing that must be two or more characters.

Shohei Ohtani Throws 1-Hit Complete-Game Shutout in Game 1 of a Doubleheader, Hits 2 Home Runs Game 2 ★

Come on, Hal Steinbrenner. Let’s get this guy into pinstripes where he belongs.

Jon Prosser on Marques Brownlee ★

Lovely, heartfelt salute to MKBHD from Jon “Front Page Tech” Prosser. Brownlee is so good at what he does, it almost defies description. His reviews are fair, deeply informed, and fun to watch. His taste is exquisite. He’s a dynamic, compelling presence on screen. He’s incredibly prolific yet always leaves you wanting more. The production values of his videos push the envelope of the state of the art: they look and sound (including the music) better than anything else on YouTube, and top YouTubers long ago surpassed broadcast TV in this regard. He’s simultaneously an expert pundit, worldwide on-camera star, and talented filmmaker.

Thursday, 27 July 2023

Esther Crawford on Twitter, Before and After Charles Foster Musk’s Takeover ★

Esther Crawford (previously mentioned here, when she bragged about sleeping at work to meet an unnecessary deadline at Twitter), wrote a fascinating essay about her time at the company, before and after Musk’s acquisition.

Although I didn’t know much about Elon I was cautiously optimistic — I saw him as the guy who built incredible and enduring companies like Tesla and SpaceX, so perhaps his private ownership could shake things up and breathe new life into the company.

Crawford was inside the company, and I’m far outside it, but that’s exactly why I was optimistic about Twitter under Musk too. Twitter had ossified years ago — maybe a decade ago — and needed a drastic shake-up, a jolt to the entire system, both in the company’s culture and the product. And while I think Twitter under Musk is now far worse, he absolutely did shake things up, and the overall state of Twitter-like-services is today far, far better than it was before. Mastodon was irrelevant pre-Musk-buying-Twitter. The growth it saw after November never would have happened otherwise. I’m now optimistically bullish on Threads, and I don’t think Threads would even exist if not for Musk buying and wrecking Twitter.

I thought this was a keen insight:

Elon has an exceptional talent for tackling hard physics-based problems but products that facilitate human connection and communication require a different type of social-emotional intelligence.

Another way to think about this (and I’m cribbing from something Ben Thompson said on Dithering this week) isn’t about Musk’s lack of empathy, but simply the nature of software itself. The immutable laws of physics push back against Musk’s unreasonable demands in ways that aren’t applicable to software. He doesn’t seem to listen to people who disagree with him, but he has to listen when physics disagrees. (Today’s earlier story about Tesla fudging range estimates is purely dictated by software.)

Software demands more creative discipline than hardware, because so much discipline is baked into the nature of creating hardware. Hardware instills discipline in people; people must instill discipline into software.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t note that in all of this there is also a cautionary tale for anyone who succeeds at something — which is that the higher you climb, the smaller your world becomes. It’s a strange paradox but the richest and most powerful people are also some of the most isolated.

I found myself frequently looking at Elon and seeing a person who seemed quite alone because his time and energy was so purely devoted to work, which is not the model of a life I want to live.

Charles Foster Musk, muttering “X” instead of “Rosebud”.

‘We Can’t Just Keep Handing Out Water’ ★

Benjamin Wermund and Jhair Romero, reporting for The Houston Chronicle (News+ link):

Several migrants asked for water but were turned down by troopers who said there was none, even though cases of bottled water were kept at many of the military-like outposts along the river.

Olivarez said earlier in the day that troopers are told to use their judgment and discretion when deciding to distribute drinking water. He said the state cannot give a bottle to everyone when 600 to 1,000 people are crossing every day.

“If they see a child or an adult that looks like they’re suffering from some kind of heat exhaustion, they’ll give them water,” Olivarez said. “But we can’t just keep handing out water because what’s going to happen is, you’re going to continue to encourage them to come.”

This is how you know Texas governor Greg Abbott is an idiot — the cruelty in this passage is off the charts. We’re talking about water here, in severe heat. (Via Adam Isacson, who comments, “As if giving water to asylum seekers in a heat wave is like giving bread to seagulls. Just incredible.”)

Tesla’s Exaggerated Range Estimates ★

Steve Stecklow and Norihiko Shirouzu, reporting for Reuters:

Tesla years ago began exaggerating its vehicles’ potential driving distance — by rigging their range-estimating software. The company decided about a decade ago, for marketing purposes, to write algorithms for its range meter that would show drivers “rosy” projections for the distance it could travel on a full battery, according to a person familiar with an early design of the software for its in-dash readouts.

Then, when the battery fell below 50% of its maximum charge, the algorithm would show drivers more realistic projections for their remaining driving range, this person said. To prevent drivers from getting stranded as their predicted range started declining more quickly, Teslas were designed with a “safety buffer,” allowing about 15 miles (24 km) of additional range even after the dash readout showed an empty battery, the source said.

The directive to present the optimistic range estimates came from Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk, this person said. “Elon wanted to show good range numbers when fully charged,” the person said, adding: “When you buy a car off the lot seeing 350-mile, 400-mile range, it makes you feel good.”

This is not an “everyone does” situation:

Jonathan Elfalan, vehicle testing director for the automotive website Edmunds.com, reached a similar conclusion to Pannone after an extensive examination of vehicles from Tesla and other major automakers, including Ford, General Motors, Hyundai and Porsche. All five Tesla models tested by Edmunds failed to achieve their advertised range, the website reported in February 2021. All but one of 10 other models from other manufacturers exceeded their advertised range.

Starting to pick up a pattern with this guy Musk.

Kindness as a Signifier of Intelligence ★

This clip from Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker’s commencement speech at Northwestern rings so true to me. The older I get, the more my thinking runs along the exact same line. Worth watching the whole clip, but here’s the nut:

The best way to spot an idiot? Look for the person who is cruel. When we see someone who doesn’t look like us, or sound like us, or act like us, or love like us, or live like us — the first thought that crosses almost everyone’s brain is rooted in either fear or judgment or both. That’s evolution. We survived as a species by being suspicious of things we aren’t familiar with.

In order to be kind, we have to shut down that animal instinct and force our brain to travel a different pathway. Empathy and compassion are evolved states of being. They require the mental capacity to step past our most primal urges. I’m here to tell you that when someone’s path through this world is marked with acts of cruelty, they have failed the first test of an advanced society. They never forced their animal brain to evolve past its first instinct. They never forged new mental pathways to overcome their own instinctual fears. And so, their thinking and problem-solving will lack the imagination and creativity that the kindest people have in spades.

Over my many years in politics and business, I have found one thing to be universally true: the kindest person in the room is often the smartest.

I like the idea of responding to acts of cruelty with “Idiot”.

You’ll Never Guess What Twitter Did With the Guy Who Had the @x Handle (Spoiler: You Will Guess) ★

Sarah Perez, writing for TechCrunch:

The owner of the @x Twitter handle confirmed that the company, now known as X, took over his account without warning or financial compensation, telling him the handle is property of X. The handle had previously belonged to Gene X Hwang of the corporate photography and videography studio Orange Photography. In a letter, the company formerly known as Twitter thanked Hwang for his loyalty and offered him a selection of X merchandise and a tour of X’s HQ, as a “reflection of our appreciation.”

One way or another, X Corp was going to get the @x handle. But this was, unsurprisingly, a pretty shitty way to do it. Kudos to Hwang for taking it all in good spirit. (The account’s new handle: @x12345678998765.)

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Tuesday, 25 July 2023

Apple’s MLS Deal Seems to Be Doing Well ★

John Ourand and Alex Silverman, reporting for Sports Business Journal:

As Apple’s Eddy Cue began speaking to a room filled with MLS owners and executives last week in Washington, D.C., he harked back to conversations he had with league officials a year earlier, just as Apple was signing a 10-year deal for the league’s media rights.

At that time, Cue recalled last Wednesday, when several MLS owners and league executives came up to him and asked what the teams could do to help ensure that the groundbreaking deal was successful, Cue would offer the same response — sign good players.

Addressing the MLS board of governors just days before the world’s greatest soccer player, Lionel Messi, would debut for Inter Miami CF, Cue smiled and told the group of MLS owners and officials, “Boy did you deliver.”

Messi’s debut on Friday was spectacularly dramatic — a game-winning free kick in extra time. If you put that in a movie script people would roll their eyes.

The number of MLS Season Pass subscribers is a closely guarded secret. Viewership figures for individual games are never shared publicly. Multiple high-level club business executives said they were required by [Apple, sic] to sign non-disclosure agreements in order to see any numbers pertaining to the number of MLS Season Pass subscribers. [...]

Sources said MLS Season Pass is approaching 1 million subscribers, a number that includes season-ticket holders who are provided access as part of their purchase. In early June, those same sources had the MLS Season Pass subscriber base at 700,000, which league executives believe shows good growth, and they expect that number to balloon even further once Messi starts playing.

One of the striking differences between traditional TV broadcasting and streaming — not just for sports, but everything — is that with traditional TV, viewership ratings are public. The networks brag about high ratings. With streaming, viewership is a tightly-held secret. Is 1 million subscribers an accurate count for MLS Season Pass? Only Apple knows. Is that a good number? It’s hard to say, because the NFL, NBA, and MLB keep the numbers for their equivalent subscription packages secret too.

Threads Now Has a Chronological Timeline ★

Threads:

The For you feed includes a mix of posts from profiles you follow and recommended accounts. Following shows you posts from profiles you’re following, starting with the most recent.

To switch from For you to Following, tap on the Threads icon at the top of your feed and swipe.

Threads launched strong and is steadily improving each week. (Tip: If you update to the new version and don’t see the new Following tab, force-quit the app and relaunch. That did the trick for me.) The one bummer: Threads will default back to the For You timeline when you re-launch the app. Not surprising, given that Instagram does the same. (To get to the Following timeline in Instagram, tap the Instagram logo of the Home tab; that presents a menu with options for “Following” and “Favorites”. This is fairly described as a “hidden feature” given that the Instagram logo doesn’t look like a drop-down menu until after you’ve tapped it, at which point they display downward chevron.)

The much-requested Threads web app is coming soon, apparently.

Republican Counties Had Higher COVID Death Rates After Vaccines Became Available ★

Jacob Wallace, Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham, and Jason L. Schwartz, in a paper published in JAMA Internal Medicine, “Excess Death Rates for Republican and Democratic Registered Voters in Florida and Ohio During the COVID-19 Pandemic”:

Between January 1, 2018, and December 31, 2021, there were 538,159 individuals in Ohio and Florida who died at age 25 years or older in the study sample. The median age at death was 78 years (IQR, 71-89 years). Overall, the excess death rate for Republican voters was 2.8 percentage points, or 15%, higher than the excess death rate for Democratic voters (95% prediction interval [PI], 1.6-3.7 percentage points). After May 1, 2021, when vaccines were available to all adults, the excess death rate gap between Republican and Democratic voters widened from −0.9 percentage point (95% PI, −2.5 to 0.3 percentage points) to 7.7 percentage points (95% PI, 6.0-9.3 percentage points) in the adjusted analysis; the excess death rate among Republican voters was 43% higher than the excess death rate among Democratic voters. The gap in excess death rates between Republican and Democratic voters was larger in counties with lower vaccination rates and was primarily noted in voters residing in Ohio.

This study strongly suggests that the only thing that mattered regarding COVID mortality was vaccination. Also, COVID was/is a disease that largely kills the elderly — the excess mortality in this study was entirely amongst people 75 and older. Even amongst those 65–74, excess mortality was down. All the other policy differences between Republican and Democratic-leaning counties made for no difference in mortality rates before vaccines were available.

I’m not sure what to make of the fact that the excess death rate was pronounced only in Ohio, and not Florida. The study itself doesn’t seem to offer a hypothesis for that discrepancy. Perhaps weather? Old people in Ohio spent more time indoors, where COVID is far more likely to spread?

(Via Political Wire.)

Monday, 24 July 2023

Single-Letter Second-Level Domain Names ★

Wikipedia:

Single-letter second-level domains are domains in which the second-level domain of the domain name consists of only one letter, such as X.com. In 1993, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) explicitly reserved all single-letter and single-digit second-level domains under the top-level domains com, net, and org, and grandfathered those that had already been assigned. In December 2005, ICANN considered auctioning these domain names.

On December 1, 1993, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) explicitly reserved the remaining single-letter and single-digit domain names. The few domains that were already assigned were grandfathered in and continued to exist.

Fascinating bit of domain name trivia. Among the six single-character com/net/org domains in use is X.org, the home of the open source X Window System. My favorite, though, is obviously Q.net. (Via Manton Reece.)

Using AirPods as a Hearing Aid ★

Garry Knight:

I spent a lot of time some years ago working with very loud sound while producing music with pro level headphones. Subsequently my ability to hear sounds at 1,000 Hz and above was greatly reduced. Amongst other things this meant that it was difficult to hear consonants in speech, effectively making me partially deaf.

I got a pair of AirPod Pro earbuds and set them up for my personal hearing needs. Later that day I went for a walk in my local woods and literally gasped out loud at hearing the birds I’d been missing for some years!

The way you set them up is buried deep in the Settings, so it’s not surprising that not many people know about it. Here’s where you need to go.

Apple can’t bill them as hearing aids for regulatory reasons, but I keep seeing reports from people who are hard of hearing who find AirPods Pro to be remarkable as audio accessibility devices. (Via Kottke.)

The Yankees Booger Up Their Uniforms With Patches From Starr Insurance ★

Speaking of my telling the Yankees what to do, the only way these gross arm patches are acceptable is if they put every dollar from the sponsorship — a reported $25 million per year — toward signing Shohei Ohtani, who, despite the patch, is going to look sharp in pinstripes.

Tony Bennett Sings ‘America the Beautiful’ at Yankee Stadium in 1998 ★

The Yankees should play this recording during the 7th inning stretch henceforth, in lieu of God Bless America (which they’ve been playing since 9/11). Just perfect.

Summer Updates: iOS 16.6, MacOS Ventura 13.5, WatchOS 9.6, and tvOS 16.6 ★

Juli Clover, writing at MacRumors:

The iOS 16.6, iPadOS 16.6, macOS Ventura 13.5, watchOS 9.6, and tvOS 16.6 updates that Apple released today address a long list of security vulnerabilities, including two that Apple says may have been actively exploited. Apple today also released iOS 15.7.8, iPadOS 15.7.8, macOS Monterey 12.6.8, and macOS Big Sur 11.7.9 for devices that are not able to run the current release versions of the Mac, iPhone, and iPad software. These updates contain the same security improvements.

It’s thankless work producing these end-of-the-major-version updates, but kind of a shame that they go largely unheralded. Our attention is naturally drawn to the big new .0 updates that introduce major new features, but these .5/.6 updates tend to be the most stable and reliable releases.

‘If Other Media Companies Thought About Brand Equity the Way Elon Musk Thinks About Twitter’s (Er, X’s)’ ★

Respect to Joshua Benton for parodying the nearly un-parody-able.

Linda Yaccarino on X ★

Twitter/X “CEO” Linda Yaccarino’s comments on the platform’s name change deserve to be quoted in full, for posterity:

It’s an exceptionally rare thing — in life or in business — that you get a second chance to make another big impression. Twitter made one massive impression and changed the way we communicate. Now, X will go further, transforming the global town square.

X is the future state of unlimited interactivity — centered in audio, video, messaging, payments/banking — creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities. Powered by AI, X will connect us all in ways we’re just beginning to imagine.

For years, fans and critics alike have pushed Twitter to dream bigger, to innovate faster, and to fulfill our great potential. X will do that and more. We’ve already started to see X take shape over the past 8 months through our rapid feature launches, but we’re just getting started.

There’s absolutely no limit to this transformation. X will be the platform that can deliver, well … everything. @elonmusk and I are looking forward to working with our teams and every single one of our partners to bring X to the world.

Nilay Patel, on Threads, reminds me where I’ve heard similar rhetoric before:

Today we celebrate the first glorious anniversary of the Information Purification Directive. We have created for the first time in all history a garden of pure ideology, where each worker may bloom secure from the pests of contradictory and confusing truths. Our Unification of Thought is more powerful a weapon than any fleet or army on earth. We are one people, with one will, one resolve, one cause. Our enemies shall talk themselves to death and we will bury them with their own confusion.

Elon Musk Renames Twitter to X ★

Ryan Mac and Tiffany Hsu, reporting for The New York Times:

The tech billionaire, who bought Twitter last year, renamed the social platform X.com on its website and started replacing the bird logo with a stylized version of the 24th letter of the Latin alphabet. Inside Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco, X logos were projected in the cafeteria, while conference rooms were renamed to words with X in them, including “eXposure,” “eXult” and “s3Xy,” according to photos seen by The New York Times.

This is why Tesla’s vehicles are the models S, 3, X, and Y, and listed in that order on the company’s website. It’s like the arrow in the FedEx logo but for 12-year-old boys.

Mr. Musk had long said he might make the name change, but he hastened the process in a tweet early Sunday when he declared that “soon we shall bid adieu to the twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds.” He has said he hopes to turn Twitter into an “everything app” called X, which would encompass not only social networking but also banking and shopping.

Early on Monday, Mr. Musk also shared a photo of a giant X projected on Twitter’s San Francisco office building with the caption: “Our headquarters tonight.”

I hate^* to say “I told you so”, but I predicted this exact name change back on May 1. As I wrote when I reiterated this prediction a few weeks later:

The fact that he largely refers to it now as “this platform” makes me think he’s going to rename it X sooner rather than later. Seems crazy to me to throw away the Twitter brand name though, so maybe “X” will just be to Twitter what “Meta” is to Facebook and “Alphabet” is to Google. But also: Musk does crazy things. Throwing away the entire Twitter brand would be less crazy than his buying it in the first place.

The Times piece quotes a branding expert who says the obvious, that the verbification of a brand name is exceedingly rare and exceptionally valuable. When people post to Twitter they tweet. The things they tweet are tweets. Everyone — even people who’ve never once used Twitter, knows what tweet means. And now Musk thinks they’ll be called “x’s”?

Despite the fact that Musk has clearly been moving toward this name change for months — if not since before he even proposed buying the company — the changeover has been utterly (but predictably) slapdash. The new logo, which Musk claims is “interim”, is simply the Unicode character “𝕏” (U+1D54F, MATHEMATICAL DOUBLE-STRUCK CAPITAL X). The company tried replacing the sign on its San Francisco headquarters today but work was halted with the signage only partially dismantled over confusion as to whether the company had a work permit. Neither the iOS nor Android app has been updated, and even the company’s website still says “Twitter” just about everywhere.

* Where by hate I of course mean love, and I’ve been insufferably parading my Being Right Point™ for this prediction all weekend.

Sunday, 23 July 2023

Jigx ★

My thanks to Jigx for sponsoring last week at DF. Jigx empowers anyone with basic development and SQL skills to build native iOS apps. Not squashed websites in a native container. But powerful, pixel-perfect mobile apps that run natively on iOS and iPadOS. Serious well-crafted apps that you can be proud of, and that people love to use.

Use Jigx to solve all kinds of business problems or build that killer business app on your bucket list. Jigx does all the heavy lifting so you can go from idea to mobile app faster than ever.

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