By John Gruber

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Misbehavior in Robotaxis ★

Liz Lindqwister, writing for The San Francisco Standard:

Ever thought about getting down and dirty in a robotaxi? Want to light up a cig or a joint on the drive home from the club? You’re not alone.

As autonomous vehicles become increasingly popular in San Francisco, some riders are wondering just how far they can push the vehicles’ limits — especially with no front-seat driver or chaperone to discourage them from questionable behavior.

For some, that’s a welcome invitation to test the autonomous vehicles’ limits. Megan, a woman in her 20s, took her first robotaxi ride on a recent late-night excursion. It was also her first time having sex in a driverless vehicle. The Standard is not providing exact dates of the riders’ debauchery to protect their privacy but has verified the rides took place through documentation. Names have been changed because of the riders’ privacy concerns.

Setting aside questions regarding their driving ability, autonomous taxis will prove to be an interesting behavioral playground. How clean will they remain? What’s to keep people from smoking, littering, pissing, puking, and, yes, screwing inside? If 95 percent of passengers can behave as they would in a human-driven taxi or ride share, but the other 5 don’t, they could turn putrid quickly. Like I wrote last night, you need to design for how people do behave, not how they should.

These robotaxis are all equipped with cameras, and the paying passenger is known through their account with the service, but the more you surveil their behavior while riding, the more you encroach on their privacy.

‘X Marks the Verb’ ★

A few weeks ago when Twitter was renamed to X, and we learned that Elon Musk somehow thinks people are going to use “x” as both a verb and noun, I recalled having once stumbled upon this 1983 “On Language” column from the late great William Safire:

“The Federal bureaucracy has invented a new verb,” says Charles DeLaFuente of Kew Gardens, N.Y., who had just sent in his 1040 income-tax return to the Internal Revenue Service. He attached an addressed envelope that he had received from the I.R.S.; in the upper left-hand corner, where the return address of the taxpayer belongs, is the heavy black outline of a box. Next to the box are the words “X box if refund.”

“Never mind the unanswered question, ‘If refund what?’,” the irate taxpayer observed. “We all know they mean to x the box if you have a refund coming. Maybe the ink they saved on those instructions will pay for the next round of tax cuts.”

Mr. DeLaFuente — his name means “of the fountain” — is blowing his geyser for the wrong reason. The verb to x is not new. In 1849, Edgar Allan Poe wrote in one of his tales: “‘I shell have to x this ere paragrab,’ said he to himself, as he read it over.” In 1935, Jonas Bayer carried that crossing-out metaphor into the mechanical age in Startling Detective magazine: “An imported hatchet man with a .45-caliber typewriter can x out the dangerous canary.” Merriam-Webster’s first citation in the one-letter verb’s literal sense is from Henry Cassidy’s 1943 book “Moscow Dateline”: “I x’d out the word ‘west’ in the third question, changing it to ‘east.’”

The whole column is a goldmine, including a section on the Philly accent (Eagles = “Iggles”) and another referencing perhaps the coolest-named American who ever lived, Pussyfoot Johnson. (NYT subscribers can read the scans of the original Sunday magazine issue.)

‘The Famous F40’ Vector Illustration by David Rumfelt ★

Matt Sephton:

I was looking through some old Macintosh CD-ROMs, searching for my usual things that I do whenever I add new discs to my collection: hanafuda, specific artists, favourite software, plugins for said favourite software, and so on. Whilst I was deep in the filesystem I stumbled across some old sample files from Deneba Canvas and noticed how they were all credited to the artist.

Intrigue got the better of me so I did a quick google and came up with a post on the Canvas GFX website (yes, the software still exists!) about David Rumfelt and his most famous work: a cutaway illustration of a Ferrari F40. [...]

Maybe this will transport you back through time to when you were young!?

Indeed, this took me back in time so clearly that it might as well have been a DeLorean, not a Ferrari.

Thursday, 10 August 2023

‘Fantasy Meets Reality’ ★

Cabel Sasser:

But honestly, a lot of it, I think, is just that some designers are amazing at imagining things, but not as amazing at imagining them surrounded by the universe. That beautiful thing you’re working on, it lives in a window on your monitor tucked under a title bar, and that’s as tricky as it gets. What if you can’t imagine your thing in its final context? What if you aren’t great at predicting human behaviors other than your own? What if you push a worst-case scenario out of your mind because you like your idea so much that it’s “at least worth trying”? (I’ve done this!) Maybe you’ve forgotten how you would goof around with your friends to make them laugh way back when. Or maybe, a little bit sadly, you’ve forgotten what it’s like to experience the world as a kid. Not everyone will, or can, have these skills.

It almost seems like there’s a real job here for the right type of person. “Real World Engineer”? Unfortunately, the closest thing most companies currently have is “lawyer”.

Design is for humans, and needs to account for how people do behave, not how they should.

CNet Deletes Thousands of Old Articles in Futile, Wrong-Headed Attempt to Game Google Search ★

Thomas Germain, reporting for Gizmodo:

Archived copies of CNET’s author pages show the company deleted small batches of articles prior to the second half of July, but then the pace increased. Thousands of articles disappeared in recent weeks. A CNET representative confirmed that the company was culling stories but declined to share exactly how many it has taken down. The move adds to recent controversies over CNET’s editorial strategy, which has included layoffs and experiments with error-riddled articles written by AI chatbots.

“Removing content from our site is not a decision we take lightly. Our teams analyze many data points to determine whether there are pages on CNET that are not currently serving a meaningful audience. This is an industry-wide best practice for large sites like ours that are primarily driven by SEO traffic,” said Taylor Canada, CNET’s senior director of marketing and communications. “In an ideal world, we would leave all of our content on our site in perpetuity. Unfortunately, we are penalized by the modern internet for leaving all previously published content live on our site.” A representative for the CNET Media Workers Union declined to comment. (Disclosure: Gizmodo’s Editor in Chief Dan Ackerman is a former CNET employee.)

CNET shared an internal memo about the practice. Removing, redirecting, or refreshing irrelevant or unhelpful URLs “sends a signal to Google that says CNET is fresh, relevant and worthy of being placed higher than our competitors in search results,” the document reads.

If you think it sounds really stupid that Google would penalize websites in search rankings for new content because they’re hosting an archive of older content, you’re right, that is stupid. And Google isn’t stupid. From Google’s Search Liaison Twitter account yesterday:

Are you deleting content from your site because you somehow believe Google doesn’t like “old” content? That’s not a thing! Our guidance doesn’t encourage this. Older content can still be helpful, too. Learn more about creating helpful content.

Countering this clear message from Google not to do this, Gizmodo cites the other side:

However, SEO experts told Gizmodo content pruning can be a useful strategy in some cases, but it’s an “advanced” practice that requires high levels of expertise, according to Chris Rodgers, founder and CEO of CSP, an SEO agency.

Expertise you can only obtain by hiring a firm like CSP, of course. And:

“Just because Google says that deleting content in isolation doesn’t provide any SEO benefit, this isn’t always true,” said Lily Ray, Senior Director of SEO and Head of Organic Research at Amsive Digital.

This is like quoting voodoo witch doctors arguing that voodoo sometimes works.

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Thursday, 10 August 2023

Gizmodo Editor-in-Chief Dan Ackerman Sues Apple, Alleging ‘Tetris’ Movie Ripped Off His Book ★

Blake Brittain, reporting for Reuters:

Dan Ackerman, editor in chief of the tech-news website Gizmodo, filed a lawsuit in Manhattan federal court on Monday accusing Apple, the Tetris Company and others of adapting his book about the landmark video game Tetris into a feature film without his permission. Ackerman said he sent his book The Tetris Effect in 2016 to the Tetris Company, which allegedly copied it for the movie and threatened to sue him if he pursued his own film or television spinoffs.

Reuters is hosting a copy of Ackerman’s complaint, which begins:

The movie entitled “Tetris” demonstrated the confiscation of Dan Ackerman’s original work and creation of his book “The Tetris Effect.”

Plaintiff Ackerman’s book took a unique approach to writing about the real history of Tetris, as it not only applied the historical record, but also layered his own original research and ingenuity to create a compelling narrative non-fiction book in the style of a Cold War spy thriller.

Mr. Ackerman’s literary masterpiece, unlike other articles and writings, dispelled of the emphasis on the actual gameplay and fans, and instead concentrated on the surrounding narrative, action sequences, and adversarial relationship between the players.

This was the identical approach Defendants adopted for the Tetris Film, without notable material distinction, but often resonating the exact same feel, tone, approach, and scenes as the book introduced several years prior.

I have watched the movie (enjoyable, but flawed) and not read Ackerman’s book, so I’m in no position to judge whether the movie is a rip-off of the book.

I do find it a bit curious that there’s no coverage of this lawsuit, at least yet, at Gizmodo itself, nor from Ackerman.

Banks Fined $549 Million for Conducting Business Via iMessage, Signal, and WhatsApp ★

Wes Davis, reporting for The Verge:

Several US financial firms, including multiple Wells Fargo companies, will pay a combined $549 million in fines after admitting they couldn’t produce discussions about company business from smartphone messaging apps used by their employees, “including those at senior levels.”

Both the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) fined banks for being unable to produce discussions going back to at least 2019. The regulators say employees used their personal devices to discuss official company business via apps like iMessage, WhatsApp, or Signal and that those “off-channel communications” weren’t “maintained or preserved.”

Not keeping records of those conversations violates the 1934 Securities Exchange Act’s recordkeeping rules, as well as similar rules from the Investment Advisers Act of 1940, according to the SEC. The CFTC maintains its own recordkeeping requirements, which it says were violated.

My first thought was, “I’ll bet they regret using encrypted messaging for this.”

My second thought was, “But... depending on what they were discussing, maybe not?”

Sometimes paying a fine — even a stiff one — is a win.

Stranded in Maui Wildfire, No Cell Service, Rescued Via Emergency SOS ★

Michael J. Miraflor on Twitter/X:

My brother’s girlfriend’s cousin and his family were caught in their vehicle in Maui while the wildfires suddenly erupted around them.

No cell service, so Apple Emergency SOS was the only way they could get in contact with first responders. Literally saved their lives.

Trapped in a car, surrounded by fire, no visibility. The screenshots of this exchange with emergency services had my palms sweating.

Worth a moment to remind yourself how the SOS feature works.

Wednesday, 9 August 2023

Stanford Study on CSAM on Mastodon ★

David Thiel and Renee DiResta, announcing their own report for Stanford’s Internet Observatory investigating child sexual abuse material on Mastodon servers:

Analysis over a two-day period found 112 matches for known child sexual abuse material (CSAM) in addition to nearly 2,000 posts that used the 20 most common hashtags which indicate the exchange of abuse materials. The researchers reported CSAM matches to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

The report finds that child safety challenges pose an issue across decentralized social media networks and require a collective response. Current tools for addressing child sexual exploitation and abuse online — such as PhotoDNA and mechanisms for detecting abusive accounts or recidivism — were developed for centrally managed services and must be adapted for the unique architecture of the Fediverse and similar decentralized social media projects.

Their report is interesting and nuanced, and points to aspects of the problem you might not have considered. For example, tooling:

Administrative moderation tooling is also fairly limited: for example, while Mastodon allows user reports and has moderator tools to review them, it has no built-in mechanism to report CSAM to the relevant child safety organizations. It also has no tooling to help moderators in the event of being exposed to traumatic content — for example, grayscaling and fine-grained blurring mechanisms.

I cannot agree with the headlines regarding this report:

• The Washington Post: “Twitter Rival Mastodon Rife With Child-Abuse Material, Study Finds”
• The Verge: “Stanford Researchers Find Mastodon Has a Massive Child Abuse Material Problem”
• Engadget: “Mastodon’s Decentralized Social Network Has a Major CSAM Problem”

Every instance of CSAM is a heinous crime. But it’s impractical to think that any large-scale social network could be utterly free of CSAM, or CSAM-adjacent material. Words like rife, massive, and major to me do not fairly describe the report’s findings. My conclusion is that while Mastodon server admins can do a better job — and seem sorely in need of better content moderation tooling for handling CSAM — the overall frequency of such material on the top 25 instances is lower than I expected, especially from the headlines.

(I also suspect, simply through gut feeling, that much if not most CSAM in the fediverse occurs on smaller fly-by-night instances, not the big public ones which the Stanford study examined.)

Remembering Mimi Sheraton, Innovative New York Times Food Critic ★

In the course of researching that previous item, wherein then-NYT restaurant critic Mimi Sheraton accompanied Colonel Sanders to a Manhattan KFC in 1976, I learned that she died just a few months ago, at age 97. Truly a groundbreaking career:

An adventurer with a passion for offbeat experiences, an eclectic taste for foods and the independence to defy pressures from restaurateurs and advertisers, Ms. Sheraton was the first woman to review restaurants for The Times. She pioneered reviewing-in-disguise, dining in wigs and tinted glasses and using aliases for reservations, mostly in high-end places where people would have otherwise known her from repeat visits and lavished their attentions on her.

“The longer I reviewed restaurants, the more I became convinced that the unknown customer has a completely different experience from either a valued patron or a recognized food critic,” she wrote in her 2004 memoir, “Eating My Words: An Appetite for Life.” “For all practical purposes, they might as well be in different restaurants.”

Knowing what I know about the restaurant industry, it’s hard to believe reviews were ever conducted not in disguise. That regular patrons (and recognized critics) get better service and food couldn’t be more obvious, which is the reason it’s such a joy to find your favorite spots and become a valued regular at them.

Colleagues and other restaurant critics described her reviews as tough but fair and scrupulously researched. The Times required three visits to a restaurant before publishing a review; she dined six to eight times before passing judgment. For an article on deli sandwiches, she collected 104 corned beef and pastrami samples in one day to evaluate the meat and sandwich-building techniques. [...]

Another of her reviews, based on blind tastings by several Times staff members, favored private-label liquors over popular brand names of Scotch, bourbon, rye, vodka and gin. The review ran weeks before Christmas, the busy liquor-selling season.

“I heard that two million dollars’ worth of advertising had been canceled,” Ms. Sheraton recalled in her memoir. She approached the executive editor. “I asked Abe Rosenthal if that was true. He said, ‘That’s none of your business. It was a great story.’”

‘For the Colonel, It Was Finger‐Lickin’ Bad’ ★

MrBeast being displeased with the quality of MrBeast Burgers brings to my mind Colonel Harland Sanders, who founded Kentucky Fried Chicken, sold the company to a conglomerate in 1964, and then remained their paid spokesman for the remainder of his life, despite the fact that he despised their food and professed deep regret that he sold the chain. In 1976, New York Times restaurant critic Mimi Sheraton accompanied the then-86-year-old Sanders to a KFC in midtown Manhattan:

Once in the kitchen, the colonel walked over to a vat full of frying chicken pieces and announced, “That’s much too black. It should be golden brown. You’re frying for 12 minutes — that’s six minutes too long. What’s more, your frying fat should have been changed a week ago. That’s the worst fried chicken I’ve ever seen. Let me see your mashed potatoes with gravy, and how do you make them?”

When Mr. Singleton explained that he first mixed boiling water into the instant powdered potatoes, the colonel interrupted. “And then you have wallpaper paste,” he said. “Next suppose you add some of this brown gravy stuff and then you have sludge.” “There’s no way anyone can get me to swallow those potatoes,” he said after tasting some. “And this cole slaw. This cole slaw! They just won’t listen to me. It should he chopped, not shredded, and it should be made with Miracle Whip. Anything else turns gray. And there should be nothing in it but cabbage. No carrots!”

Mr. Singleton replied, “I just do what I’m told, sir,” and Colonel Sanders then said gently to the now stunned manager, “Well, it’s not your fault. You’re just working for a company that doesn’t know what it’s doing.”

Sanders was being paid $200,000 a year at the time to represent the chain in commercials. But what were they going to do — fire him? I wonder how many kids today realize Sanders was a real man who actually founded the chain, and not a fictional mascot, like Ronald McDonald, or the great pizza connoisseur Charles Entertainment Cheese?

MrBeast Sued for $100 Million by Company Behind His Virtual Burger Restaurant Chain ★

Elizabeth Wagmeister, reporting for Variety:

The biggest YouTube star in the world — Jimmy Donaldson, aka MrBeast — is being sued by Virtual Dining Concepts, the ghost kitchen company that operates his virtual restaurant chain, MrBeast Burger. [...]

In Donaldson’s original lawsuit against VDC, he blamed the company for poor food quality and said that the majority of MrBeast Burger virtual restaurants have negative culinary reviews from fans who are “deeply disappointed by the fact that MrBeast would put his name on this product.” The lawsuit said that VDC “has caused material, irreparable harm to the MrBeast brand and MrBeast’s reputation,” and claimed that while the business has made millions of dollars, he has “not received a dime.” In response, last week, VDC asserted that the YouTube star’s brand grew “exponentially” in part “because of the MrBeast Burger brand itself.”

The argument that Donaldson’s brand grew because of the burger brand seems specious. But perhaps I’m out of touch with the latest trends in fast food — I’d never heard of MrBeast Burger until recently, but it turns out they have “ghost kitchens” all over the place, including here in Philadelphia.

Yankee Stadium Drone Fly-Through ★

I suspect even those who dislike the Yankees will enjoy this. Captivating.

Monday, 7 August 2023

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”.

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