Linked List: March 6, 2023

Monday, 6 March 2023

Phony Stark Stiffed Amazon on Twitter’s AWS Bill, So Amazon Threatened to Pull Its Ads ★

Erin Woo, reporting for The Information (paywalled, alas):

Elon Musk is running into an obstacle in his relentless drive to cut costs at Twitter: some of the same vendors that Twitter is squeezing to save money are also its advertising clients.

As recently as last month, Twitter sales and marketing staff were told by their colleagues that Amazon had threatened to withhold payment for advertising it runs on Twitter because the social network for months refused to pay its Amazon Web Services bills for cloud computing services, according to two people familiar with the discussions.

The ad threat may have had an impact. A couple of weeks ago, Twitter paid AWS $10 million for cloud services it used, but that’s a drop in the bucket compared to what Twitter owes AWS based on a long-term contract the companies struck, said a person familiar with the situation. [...] Twitter’s shortfall on what it is supposed to have spent on AWS services, under a five and a half year contract signed in 2020, is now at least $70 million. And Amazon has resisted renegotiating the contract, the person said.

It’s a lot easier to bully around smaller companies, and stiff them on their bills. Not so much a bigger company. Renegotiating a contract like this is like asking to renegotiate your poker bet after you’ve lost the hand. I would imagine the negotiations have been going something like this:

Twitter: We’d like to renegotiate our AWS contract.

Amazon: Fuck you, pay us.

Twitter: But we’re not utilizing...

Amazon: Fuck you, pay us.

Twitter: OK, but can we...

Amazon: Fuck you, pay us.

iPhone Gaining in Popularity Worldwide, Especially With Younger People ★

Jiyoung Sohn, reporting last week for The Wall Street Journal (News+ link):

Consumers around the world are increasingly choosing Apple Inc.’s iPhones over high-end Android smartphones, with younger users seen as pushing the company toward the level of dominance in the market globally that it has enjoyed in the U.S.

In Samsung’s backyard, where the brand’s Android smartphones have held sway, Apple’s clout has been growing since the company opened its first store in South Korea in 2018. Apple now has four stores in the country, where its mobile-payment system Apple Pay will soon become available for the first time.

Around 52% of people age 18 to 29 in South Korea were using an Apple smartphone as of 2022, up from 44% two years earlier, according to polls by Gallup Korea. Samsung’s share of this age group slipped to 44% from 45% in that time, the polls showed. For all older age groups, Samsung phones remain most prevalent.

I did not know that Apple is beating Samsung in Korea in a key demographic like 18–29 year olds.

One bright spot for Samsung is that it is leading the foldable-smartphones category it helped pioneer. Sales of foldable phones represent less than 1% of the smartphones shipped worldwide today, but their increased popularity could boost Samsung’s future position in the premium category, analysts say. Apple has yet to announce any plans for foldable phones.

How is it a “bright spot” to lead a category whose sales round down to zero?

Medium’s me.dm Mastodon Server Opens Up ★

Alex Benzer, director of product at Medium:

A few weeks ago, we announced that Medium is embracing short-form writing by launching our very own Mastodon server at me.dm. Starting today, we’re opening up me.dm access for our member community. If you’re a Medium member, you can create an account on me.dm.

It’s fascinating to see Medium enter the Mastodon game. For one thing, amongst Medium’s co-founders are Ev Williams (who also served as Medium’s CEO for most of its existence) and Biz Stone — two people who were at Twitter at the beginning. Williams also served as one of Twitter’s numerous CEOs.

Second, Medium is a commercial company, having raised, according to CrunchBase, $163 million (so far). To my knowledge no company with such resources has started a public Mastodon instance to date. I am very uncomfortable with the fact that nearly all Mastodon servers are free-to-use volunteer efforts, funded by voluntary donations. That’s not sustainable. I suspect a lot of Mastodon servers that seem to be thriving today won’t be around in 5 years, taking all of their posts with them. I don’t feel great about the fact that Medium is venture-backed, either, but they do charge $5/month or $50/year for a membership. I like paying for the services I use. Twitter is free to use and look how that’s gone.

Third, “me.dm” is a cool-ass domain name. If I weren’t already all-in with my @[email protected] account, I’d be tempted to start here. As every good introduction to Mastodon makes clear, it’s confusing and tricky to choose which server to sign up on. Medium’s strikes me as a good one.

Japanese Messaging Platform Line Adds ChatGPT, Gets 200,000 Users in Three Days ★

I’m linking here to a news article from PR Times, written in Japanese, but you can get the gist of it using Safari’s built-in translation feature. (What an amazing feature, by the way. Science fiction from my childhood come to life.) ChatGPT speaks and understands Japanese, but uptake in Japan has been hampered, apparently, because you need to speak English to sign up.

Line is the dominant messaging platform in Japan, and last week they added ChatGPT. You just add “AI Chat-kun” as a friend and start chatting. Up to five messages per day are free, and you can upgrade to unlimited messages for ¥680/month (about $5).

(Via Chris Vasselli.)

A Short Story About the Mac App Store ★

Cabel Sasser, on Mastodon:

A short story. We once submitted Untitled Goose Game to the Mac App Store. It was rejected by the reviewer because they thought you couldn’t skip the credits. (?!?) We explained that you could skip the credits by holding space. It was then rejected for something else and at that point we just gave up and never bothered to resubmit. Fin

Untitled Goose Game, of course, is one of the funnest and most original games of the last decade. And Panic is a company that has made a couple of decent Mac apps over the years.

The Rogue Amoeba Historic Screenshot Archive ★

Paul Kafasis, writing at the Rogue Amoeba blog, celebrating the company’s 20th anniversary:

For many years, noted Mac collector Stephen Hackett has done wonderful work with the MacOS Screenshot Library. The library offers screenshots of the Mac’s operating system dating back to the Mac OS X Public Beta in 2000, and we’re such fans that Rogue Amoeba has sponsored it for several years now. It‘s often helpful as a reference, but it’s also simply enjoyable to look back at the way things once were.

Amazingly, Rogue Amoeba’s own story dates back nearly as far as Mac OS X’s. We opened our virtual doors in 2002, and since then, we’ve shipped nearly 1,000 different versions across our product lineup. Given that amount of history, we thought it would be both useful and fun to document our own products.

Late last year, we asked Stephen if he’d help us spin up our own archive. He was up for the challenge, so we provided him with a pile of important releases, and he set to work documenting them with his array of old Macs. When Stephen was done, he provided us with a large collection of screenshots, sorted by product and version.

Our team then curated these images and built a way to show them off. We created galleries for each product and dug up details and stories about each individual update. It was a lot of work, but the end result feels weighty, a worthwhile repository of much of our company’s history.

This is just wonderful. A few thoughts:

Be careful if you’ve got work on your plate today. You can lose an hour or two with this gallery, easy.
In hindsight it’s surprising to me how quickly Mac OS X’s pinstripes faded away. In my memory, those strong pinstripes were there for an entire era, but in reality, they started fading with each major Mac OS X release after 10.0, and by 2004 were gone.
I really miss UI design that made controls obvious. Clear affordances. All buttons obviously buttons, all text input fields obviously text input fields. Pop-up menus that are obviously pop-up menus (today’s MacOS 13 is chock full of pop-up menus that only reveal themselves as pop-ups when you hover over them). 20 years ago we bent over backwards to make the purpose of every control as obvious as possible; the style today is to make everything look like flat static text.
Depth and texture in UI are good things. Our displays have never been better suited to displaying color and fine detail, but our UI themes today look like they were designed for output on a crummy old laser printer or something.

CPAC Speaker Michael Knowles Calls for Transgender People to Be ‘Eradicated From Public Life Entirely’ ★

Peter Wade and Patrick Reis, reporting for Rolling Stone:

The right’s war on queer and trans people took center stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference as Daily Wire host Michael Knowles on Saturday called for the eradication of “transgenderism.”

During his speech on Saturday, Knowles told the crowd, “For the good of society … transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely — the whole preposterous ideology, at every level.”

Knowles subsequently claimed that “eradicating” “transgenderism” is not a call for eradicating transgender people and demanded retractions from numerous publications, including Rolling Stone.

Erin Reed, a transgender rights activist and writer, tells Rolling Stone that it’s an absurd distinction. There is no difference between a ban on “transgenderism” and an attack on transgender people, she says: “They are one and the same, and there’s no separation between them.”

The tweet linked above is from Knowles, pointing to an earlier version of the same Rolling Stone story, and reads, “This headline is libelous, and I demand a retraction.”

Keith Olbermann, in a reply to Knowles’s tweet:

You should get the fuck off the stage and apologize, asshole. This statement is your life from here on in.

Shove your hatred and bias and Nazi dreams up your ass, Motherfucker.

Olbermann took the words right out of my mouth. It’s sophistry to argue that transgenderism can be “eradicated from public life entirely” without eradicating transgender people. Eradicate is a Nazi word — one step away from exterminate — and totally means completely, absolutely, entirely. Watch the video. This is Nazism, and the only proper response to Nazis is to punch them.

Roku Doesn’t Support IPv6 and It Might Be a Big Deal ★

“DingleBog3899” on the Roku community forum (emphasis added):

Our tribal network started out IPv6, but soon learned we had to somehow support IPv4 only traffic. It took almost 11 months in order to get a small amount of IPv4 addresses allocated for this use. In fact there were only enough addresses to cover maybe 1% of population. So we were forced to create a very expensive proxy/translation server in order to support this traffic.

We learned a very expensive lesson. 71% of the IPv4 traffic we were supporting was from Roku devices. 9% coming from DishNetwork & DirectTV satellite tuners, 11% from HomeSecurity cameras and systems, and remaining 9% we replaced extremely outdated Point of Sale (POS) equipment. So we cut Roku some slack three years ago by spending a little over $300k just to support their devices.

First off I despise both Apple and that other evil empire (house of mouse) I want nothing to do with either of them. Now with that said I am one of four individuals that suggested and lobbied 15 other tribal nations to offer a new AppleTV device in exchange for active Roku devices. Other nations are facing the same dilemma. Spend an exorbitant amount of money to support a small amount of antiquated devices or replace the problem devices at fraction of the cost.

Now if Roku cannot be proactive at keeping up with connectivity standards they are going to be wiped out by their own complacency. Judging by the growing number of offers to replace their devices for free their competitors are already proactively exploiting that complacency. When we approached Apple to see about a discount to purchase a large number of their devices, for the exchange, they eagerly offered to supply their devices for free.

Seems weird to say you despise a company that supplied a Native American tribe with a slew of free Apple TVs, but the fact that he’s not an Apple fan makes it all the more telling that they went with Apple TVs as their solution. I wonder what the deal is with Roku not supporting IPv6? Is it just something they haven’t gotten to, or have they somehow engineered a tech stack that only works on IPv4?