Linked List: October 17, 2022

Monday, 17 October 2022

AI-Generated Podcast Interview Between Joe Rogan and Steve Jobs ★

I gave this about 10 minutes before I had enough. I’ve heard from a lot of people who were impressed by it, and who say they found parts of it — especially in the second half — to sound “real”, but not me. I found it creepy and stilted.

But, man, I don’t know what we’re going to do when AI gets better at stuff like this. What happens when political ratfuckers use AI to generate interviews ostensibly from their opponents? Dark times are ahead, I fear.

Update: I also don’t buy their claim that these voices are completely generated. Most of Jobs’s lines have auditorium echo — they sound like clips copy-and-pasted. If they can really generate these voices, why doesn’t their virtual Rogan actually say Steve Jobs’s name? Send me a clip of virtual Steve Jobs saying “John Gruber is a bozo, and I tell people not to waste their time reading Daring Fireball.” Then I’ll believe it.

Labor Unions in the U.S. ★

Over the weekend, linking to a story about an Oklahoma Apple Store’s vote to unionize, I wrote, “Apple’s retail stores are exceptional, but it’s starting to look like they won’t be exceptions to the resurgence of unionization in the U.S.”

Describing the current state of union membership in the U.S. as resurgent was sloppy. The actual situation is more nuanced. Union membership remains at a historic low, per this report by Madison Hoff for Business Insider:

The union membership rate has dropped over time. In 1983, the first year with available data, 20.1% of wage and salary workers were union members. A decade later in 1993 it had fallen to 15.7%. Decades later in 2021, the rate stood at 10.3%.

But public support for labor unions is at a historic high:

Additionally, Gallup data from the Gallup’s annual Work and Education survey shows that 71% of Americans approve of labor unions in 2022, up from 68% a year ago. The share in 2022 means it’s the highest share since 1965.

This public enthusiasm for labor unions is manifesting in high-profile unionization drives at big companies like Starbucks, Amazon, and now Apple.

‘Elon Musk’s X App for “Everything” Might Be a Non-Starter in the U.S.’ ★

Rita Liao, writing for TechCrunch:

Any organization that needs to produce content is on WeChat, from state media to fashion brands. The online media landscape in the U.S. is a lot more diverse. People read news on news apps, seek thought leadership on LinkedIn and encounter brands’ stories through blogs. The majority of businesses in China might not have a website, but they probably maintain a WeChat Public Account.

Over time, Public Accounts has morphed into a digital infrastructure for businesses that’s not unlike Shopify. That was made possible with the launch of WeChat Pay in 2013. While America spent the past decade improving magnetic card-enabled transactions, China never had widespread credit card adoption and went straight from paying with cash to mobile payments using QR codes.

WeChat Pay quickly attracted users in droves by becoming the default payment option for a few popular apps, including ride-hailing upstart Didi and food delivery platform Meituan — which are both backed by Tencent, one of the most prolific corporate investors in the world. Were Musk to start a new payments solution that follows WeChat Pay’s playbook, he’d have to form alliances with other internet giants to drive adoption.

Since writing about this last week, I’ve heard from numerous readers that there are more successful “everything apps” in Asian countries than I alluded to. E.g. Grab in Singapore. But WeChat is clearly the most successful, and the model for Musk’s vaguely defined “X” concept. It can’t be overstated just how essential payments are to WeChat’s dominant role in Chinese life, but that’s because — as Liao writes — China went from cash to QR codes. That’s never going to happen in the U.S. or Europe.

Neither news nor payments are centralized in the West, and we already have cemented leaders in the personal messaging space. Those are the tentpoles of these “everything apps”. Worse still for Musk and his dream of using Twitter to bootstrap such an app is that Twitter DMs are the worst personal messaging service I’ve ever used.

John Carmack: ‘There’s a Bunch That I’m Grumpy About’ ★

Kyle Orland, reporting for Ars Technica on Facebook “executive advisor” John Carmack’s unscripted (and un-legged) talk at their Meta Connect virtual conference last week:

As a “counterpoint” to the push for the Quest Pro in the Meta offices, Carmack says he “personally still [tries] to drum up interest internally in this vision of a super cheap, super lightweight headset.” His rallying cry, he says, is a target of “$250 and 250 grams” for a headset that cuts out as many extraneous features as possible while still being usable (the Quest Pro weighs 722 grams, while the Quest 2 is 503 grams). That could help bring “super light comforts” to “more people at low-end price points. [...] We’re not building that headset today, but I keep trying,” Carmack said with some exasperation.

Carmack also cautioned that developing for the Quest Pro and then “crunching it down” for Quest 2 users could lead to some “tragically bad decisions” if you’re not testing on the cheaper headset as well. “The low-end system is going to be where all your real customers are,” he warned.

That’s the catch-22. If the software is written to target the $400 Quest 2, what’s the point of buying the $1,500 Quest Pro? But if the software is written to take full advantage of the Quest Pro, what kind of experience do Quest 2 users get? This entire endeavor is not going well for Facebook — at least yet — but it seems clear that one fundamental mistake they made is selling consumer-priced hardware years before the user experience for $400 VR headsets is any good at all. Just because you want to sell $400 headsets doesn’t mean you should.

Compare and contrast with Apple, whose long-rumored upcoming headset is purported to have a starting price of $2,000. (Keep in mind that while still merely rumored, the iPad was expected to start at $1,000 but in fact started at $500.) Better to start with a great experience at a high price than a crummy experience at a low price. Set the baseline for a great experience and it will trickle down to lower price points year after year. Few new platforms ever get off the ground starting with a crap experience, no matter their price.

Throughout his talk, Carmack seemed to reserve the bulk of his grumpiness for one core area of concern: “The basic usability of Quest really does need to get better.”

For instance, you currently either need to leave your Quest 2 on and plugged in to download frequent OS and app updates, or sit through a lengthy “update hell” almost every time you pick up the headset. That leads to a lot of VR sessions that are “aborted in frustration,” Carmack said (though he hoped that the Quest Pro charging dock could help with this problem in aggregate).

Carmack shared word of internal posts from Meta employees bemoaning a 20-minute, multi-reboot process to get an old headset ready for the Connect presentation that day. He also talked about tales of Quest owners who don’t even get their headsets out to show off to houseguests because of the anticipated hassle of setting everything up for a demo.

And once a headset is up and running, Carmack complained about how slow and awkward it is to connect to other people in Meta’s metaverse. “Our app startup times are slow, our transitions are glitchy,” he said, bluntly. “We need to make it a whole lot better ... much, much faster to get into.”

Underpowered hardware and clunky software do not make for a good pairing.

Parker Ortolani’s Mockup for a Hypothetical ‘Apple Sports’ App ★

Speaking of Apple and sports, Parker Ortolani recently tweeted some mockups for a dedicated “Apple Sports” app. He’s got some fun ideas like trading-card-style player cards. The idea is a lot like Apple’s Stocks app, which is really just a business-specific offshoot of Apple News. For the same reason that print newspapers always had discrete business and sports sections, dedicated business and sports apps for Apple News make sense. And as Apple gets deeper into live sports streaming, I think it makes even more sense for them to offer a dedicated Apple Sports app than it does to have a Stocks app. In addition to sports-related news and stats, Apple Sports could be the home for live-streamed games. Streaming sports is very unlike streaming other content because watching live is so essential. So instead of cramming sports news into Apple News and sports streaming into the Apple TV app, put everything sports-related into an Apple Sports app. That should be better for everyone — sports fans get a dedicated app, and non-fans can just ignore it.

CNBC: ‘NFL Sunday Ticket Still Up for Grabs as Apple Pushes for Flexibility With Game Rights’ ★

Alex Sherman, reporting for CNBC:

Apple isn’t interested in simply acting as a conduit for broadcasting games, according to Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of services. Cue oversees Apple’s media and sports partnerships and its streaming service, Apple TV+. Apple is looking for partnerships with sports leagues in which it can offer consumers more than standard rights agreements — such as having free rein to offer games globally or in local markets. Apple has that type of deal with Major League Soccer, a 10-year partnership that begins in 2023.

“We weren’t interested in buying sports rights,” Cue said this week at a Paley Center for Media panel in New York. “There’s all kinds of capabilities that we’re going to be able to do together because we have everything together. And so if I have a great idea, I don’t have to think about, OK, well, my contract or the deal of interest will allow this.”

The iPhone maker is MLS’s exclusive broadcast partner, though some linear networks may buy simulcast rights to the soccer league’s games. The pact allows Apple to stream every game of every season for the next 10 years globally. It plans to build MLS steaming capabilities into its apps, such as Apple News.

Surely Apple has no belief that it can secure terms from the NFL similar to what it has with MLS. But Apple, from all accounts I’ve ever read or heard about from sources, always plays hardball with all negotiations. It’s part of the company’s DNA to demand the moon. And the Sunday Ticket package is apparently going to sell for billions of dollars per year. That’s real money, by anyone’s standards. But the NFL is the undisputed king of U.S. sports, and is accustomed to getting whatever it wants from its broadcast (and now streaming) partners.

Apple clearly wants to get deeper into streaming sports, and the NFL likes spreading its rights around between the major TV networks and streaming platforms. All things considered, it seems clear that the NFL would prefer for Apple to buy the Sunday Ticket rights. But neither party needs the other. Oh to be a fly on the wall for these negotiations.

Kanye West, Recently Suspended by Twitter and Instagram Over Unhinged Antisemitic Posts, to Acquire Parler ★

Brian Fung, CNN Business:

Parler’s parent company announced the deal on Monday morning, saying West had made “a groundbreaking move into the free speech media space and will never have to fear being removed from social media again.” The acquisition comes after West, who has legally changed his name to Ye, had his account temporarily locked by Twitter this month over an antisemitic tweet.

Exact terms of the Parler deal weren’t disclosed, though Parler said it must still enter into a definitive agreement with West and expects to close in the fourth quarter. Parler’s parent, Parlement Technologies, would remain involved by providing technical services and cloud support.

We need online betting markets to let us gamble on whether these “so-and-so is buying a social network” acquisitions actually go through. (For background, here’s a piece from Vox on Kanye West’s recent descent into angry, ugly, hateful antisemitic conspiracy delusions. “Theories” is too cohesive a word to describe beliefs with no more cohesion than a puff of smoke.)

Using Gestures Inside the Dynamic Island With iOS 16.1 Betas ★

I was a bit confused when people started tweeting about these gestures last week, because I couldn’t get any of them to work. Turns out they’re not present in iOS 16.0, but are enabled in the 16.1 betas. (As of this writing, that’s beta 5, released last week.) After installing the beta and playing with these gestures for a few days, I can’t say I’m a fan. I don’t see what these gestures add other than confusion — I think most people would experience these things only by accident, and consider them bugs, not features.

While I’m writing about the Dynamic Island: The more I use it, the more I agree with the common request that simply tapping an item in the Dynamic Island should open the expanded view, instead of jumping you into the app responsible for that item. Or at least there should be an option to allow single-tapping to open expanded views. Then you wouldn’t need to long-press anything. A simple single-tap would open the Dynamic Island item’s expanded view, and another single-tap inside the expanded view would jump you to the app. (Single-tapping inside the expanded view already works to jump you to the app responsible for the item.)

I see two problems with the way things work now, where you need to long-press a compact item in the Dynamic Island to open its expanded view. First, long-pressing is not discoverable. It’s very much the touchscreen equivalent of right-clicking in MacOS. There have always been some features in iOS that require a long-press — putting the home screen into jiggle mode to rearrange and remove apps, for example — but I don’t think the Dynamic Island’s expanded view should require it. I worry too many people aren’t going to know the expanded views even exist. Second, for people who do know about the expanded view, why not make it as easy as possible to get to it? Long-pressing is, by definition, slow — getting to the expanded Dynamic Island view feels like the opposite of a shortcut.

Kolide ★

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