Linked List: May 25, 2016

Wednesday, 25 May 2016

Andrew Ross Sorkin Interviews Peter Thiel 

Andrew Ross Sorkin of The New York Times scored Thiel’s first interview regarding Thiel’s heretofore secret funding Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against Gawker (to the tune of around $10 million). The problems start with the headline: “Peter Thiel, Tech Billionaire, Reveals Secret War With Gawker”. Thiel did not reveal it — Forbes did. If it were up to Thiel this would still be secret. The fact that Thiel waged his “war” secretly is a key aspect of this story that should not be brushed over.

“It’s less about revenge and more about specific deterrence,” he said in his first interview since his identity was revealed. “I saw Gawker pioneer a unique and incredibly damaging way of getting attention by bullying people even when there was no connection with the public interest.”

OK.

Mr. Thiel said he considered his financial backing of the cases against Gawker to be “one of my greater philanthropic things that I’ve done. I think of it in those terms.” He refused to divulge exactly what other cases against he has funded but said, “It’s safe to say this is not the only one.”

Philanthropy. Got it.

Update: It’s possible that Thiel himself was the source for Forbes’s story revealing his role. I didn’t see that angle, but if so, and Sorkin’s aware of it, “reveals” works in the headline. But none of Thiel’s public remarks supports that.

Elizabeth Spiers on Gawker and Peter Thiel 

Elizabeth Spiers:

On the one hand, you have to admire Thiel’s sheer and apparently unending determination to make Denton and Gawker pay for coverage he didn’t like — it’s Olympic level grudge-holding. But the retribution is incredibly disproportionate in a way that seems almost unhinged. It would be hard to argue that Thiel was materially damaged by Gawker’s coverage in the way that he’s now trying to damage Gawker. His personal finances haven’t been destroyed and even the most egregious things Gawker has written haven’t put literally everyone who works for Thiel out of a job. (What did Lifehacker ever do to Peter Thiel?) And given his hard libertarian tendencies, it should at least make him uncomfortable in a very prickly way to utilize government bureaucracy to put a capitalistic enterprise out of business.

Even if Thiel wants to argue that Owen Thomas’s 2007 notorious “Peter Thiel is Totally Gay, People” post had a cataclysmically negative emotional toll for him, trying to destroy the entire business via abuse of the U.S. legal system still seems so epic in its vindictiveness that I couldn’t help but wonder whether this kind of asymmetrical reaction is just part and parcel of what you can expect in Thiel’s orbit generally, if you choose to do business with him.

Adobe on QuickTime on Windows 

There is some irony to the fact that Adobe is wrestling with the problems caused by security vulnerabilities in an Apple plugin.

‘Oldie Complains About the Old Old Ways’ 

Brent Simmons:

So, again, I’m documenting the problems currently solved by Objective-C’s dynamism, and suggesting that Swift, as it evolves, needs to take these problems into account. The foundation should be built with some idea of what the upper floors will look like.

The answer doesn’t have to be that Swift is dynamic in the way Objective-C is, or even dynamic at all. But the eventual Swift app frameworks need to solve these problems as well as — hopefully better than — UIKit and AppKit do right now. And those solutions start with the language.

I love Brent’s open-minded approach to this debate. One thing I’ve seen some “I’ve switched to Swift and don’t miss the dynamic aspects of Objective-C” proponents seemingly overlook is that today’s Swift apps for iOS and Mac rely (deeply) upon the dynamic Objective-C runtime and frameworks. There’s no such thing as a pure-Swift app on iOS or Mac today — they’re apps written in Swift on top of dynamic frameworks.

Everything Is a Remix: The Force Awakens 

Kirby Ferguson on Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Great stuff, as usual.

Josh Marshall on Peter Thiel’s Bankrolling of Hulk Hogan’s Lawsuit Against Gawker 

Josh Marshall, writing at TPM:

It all comes down to a simple point. You may not like Gawker. They’ve published stories I would have been ashamed to publish. But if the extremely wealthy, under a veil secrecy, can destroy publications they want to silence, that’s a far bigger threat to freedom of the press than most of the things we commonly worry about on that front. If this is the new weapon in the arsenal of the super rich, few publications will have the resources or the death wish to scrutinize them closely.

Brian Roemmele on VocalIQ and the Self Learning Technology in the Next-Gen Siri 

Brian Roemmele:

It is not a secret that Siri has not kept up the pace that just about all of us expected, including some of the Siri team. The passion that Steve had seemed to have been waning deep inside of Apple and the results were Dag and Adam Cheyer moved on and formed Five Six Labs (V IV in Roman numerals) and Viv.

(VI and V are 6 and 5 in Roman numerals. IV is 4. So “Viv” could come from V-IV (5-4) or VI-V (6-5). This image from their website suggests “Viv” comes from 6-5. Anyway, Roman numerals suck. Update: The article now reads “formed Six Five Labs”, but still has the Roman numerals wrong.)

Tom Gruber, one of the original team members and the chief scientist that created Siri technology, stayed on and continued his work. During most of 2016 and 2017 we will begin to see the results of this work. I call it Siri2 and am very certain Apple will call it something else.

(No relation, for what it’s worth.)

Apple has always been a vital mix of internally created technology and acquired technology. From iTunes to TouchID Apple has been spectacular in identifying young and smart companies and integrating them into the very core of Apple.

Late in 2015 Apple approached a small Cambridge, England Voice AI company called VocalIQ and made a pitch to Blaise Thomson that he could not refuse. As a University of Cambridge spin out, VocalIQ had already been around for about 2 years and I had become very familiar with their amazing technology. VocalIQ built astounding technology that no doubt you and I will use every day, some day soon.

Via Nick Heer (whose excellent Pixel Envy should be on your daily reads list), who writes:

So, who’s excited for WWDC?