Linked List: May 1, 2021

Saturday, 1 May 2021

My thanks to Point Card for sponsoring this week at DF. Everyone loves rewards and benefits on credit cards. But there’s one thing none of us like — interest rates that pile up into debt. Now you can have the best of both worlds with all the points and none of the risk. Point Card gives you unlimited cash back on every purchase and special access to bonus point offers on some of the best brands out there. The whole experience is elevated with Point App which offers concierge-level service in a clean, obsessively-designed, and easy-to-use interface. Everyday spending has never been better.

I mean just take a look at their ad over there in the sidebar: even the cards are obsessively designed.

Update: Point Card has a special offer running through May 9: 10× points on all purchases at Apple.

The Internal Combustion Engine ★

Well-written and staggeringly well-illustrated and animated guide explaining how internal combustion engines work, by Bartosz Ciechanowski. Would love to know how he made these animated models.

Update: Ciechanowski: “I did the 3D models in @Shapr3D with small post processing in Blender, animations are just done by hand.”

Protocol Previews Next Week’s Epic Games v. Apple Court Case ★

Protocol:

Epic v. Apple starts Monday and is estimated to last about three weeks. In total, each side will have 45 hours to present its case. Gonzalez Rogers has been overseeing the case since the beginning and will preside over the trial as well.

The trial will be held largely in person, but with only six people per side allowed in the courtroom at a time. (A few witnesses will testify over Zoom.) Masks have been a contentious issue, with the court ruling that attorneys will be required to wear masks, but witnesses will be given transparent masks for when they’re testifying.

Each witness will wait in a sort of green room before they’re called to the stand. Beyond that, each company also gets a “designated representative” who can be in the courtroom the entire time. That’ll be Tim Sweeney for Epic and Phil Schiller for Apple.

Just in case there was any doubt whether Schiller, in his new role as Apple Fellow, was truly still in charge of the App Store — he is.

Apple Outlines iMac Retail Availability ★

As noted by Stephen Hackett, only the green, blue, pink, and silver iMacs will be stocked in Apple retail stores. Yellow, orange, and purple are online-order only. But I wonder if they’ll have display models of the yellow/orange/purples ones, so folks can see them in person before ordering?

Techdirt: ‘Disney Got Itself an “If You Own a Themepark...” Carveout From Florida’s Blatantly Unconstitutional Social Media Moderation Bill’ ★

Mike Masnick, writing for Techdirt:

But, it gets worse. Seeing as this is Florida, which (obviously) is a place where Disney has some clout — and Disney has famously powerful lobbyists all over the damn place — it appears that Disney made sure the Florida legislature gave them a carveout. Florida Senator Ray Rodriques introduced an amendment to the bill, which got included in the final vote. The original bill said that this would apply to any website with 100 million monthly individual users globally. The Rodriques amendment includes this exemption:

The term does not include any information service, system, Internet search engine, or access software provider operated by a company that owns and operates a theme park or entertainment complex as defined in 509.013, F.S.

In other words, Disney (which owns a ton of companies with large internet presences) will be entirely exempt. Ditto for Comcast (Universal studios) and a few others.

Reminds me of another story I recently read. Florida, along with other Republican-led states, recently passed a law that prohibits companies from banning guns in their parking lots. The Florida version of the law has a unique provision: an exception for companies that store “explosives”, including fireworks.