Linked List: April 28, 2023

Friday, 28 April 2023

The Pixelmator blog:

A new update for Photomator is now available, bringing a ton of fantastic new features, changes, and improvements. But hold on, did we say Photomator? That’s right — the app now has a snappier and catchier new name! To complete the makeover, version 2.3 also features a beautiful, refreshed design, but the biggest highlight of this update lies beyond the looks.

We’re excited to introduce an all-new and incredibly powerful selective adjustments feature that will completely change the way you edit photos in Photomator. From now on, you can easily select and edit specific areas of a photo using a variety of selections and masks, and even make selections automatically, using AI. There are just so many great new features in this update, so read along if you’d like to learn all about them, and stick around till the end for one more, very exciting announcement.

Just a terrific app that presses the boundaries of how good an iOS app can be.

More on GM Dropping CarPlay ★

Brian Sozzi, reporting for Yahoo Finance:

GM told investors on Tuesday it’s looking to achieve profit margins of more than 20% on “new businesses” by 2030. That would be above the company’s overall 2030 operating margin goal of 12% to 14%.

Pros have speculated GM could charge subscriptions for services such as insurance by tapping into an accumulating stream of data that it owns.

“It’s part of where we’re going as a company,” Jacobson added. “Obviously data and software is a big competitive space across the board.”

The more I read about GM’s thinking, the more alarming it seems. It doesn’t seem to be about being able to provide a better experience than CarPlay, but instead about collecting surveillance data that Apple’s privacy rules don’t allow. Sozzi just breezes past this notion of using surveillance data to sell car insurance, but a car that reports such data to insurance companies seems like a privacy disaster. My insurance company doesn’t need to know how fast I drive, or where I go and when.

Rest of World: ‘Twitter Is Complying With More Government Demands Under Elon Musk’ ★

Rest of World:

It’s been exactly six months since Elon Musk took over Twitter, promising a new era of free speech and independence from political bias. But Twitter’s self-reported data shows that, under Musk, the company has complied with hundreds more government orders for censorship or surveillance — especially in countries such as Turkey and India.

The data, drawn from Twitter’s reports to the Lumen database, shows that between October 27, 2022 and April 26, 2023, Twitter received a total of 971 requests from governments and courts. These requests included orders to remove controversial posts, as well as demands that Twitter produce private data to identify anonymous accounts. Twitter reported that it fully complied in 808 of those requests, and partially complied in 154 other cases. (For nine requests, it did not report any specific response.)

Free speech!

See also: Mike Masnick at Techdirt:

This isn’t a transparency report. It’s an obfuscation report. And, if Elon is correct that “transparency is the key to trust,” this report suggests you shouldn’t trust Twitter one bit.

Beating Roulette ★

Kit Chellel, in an enthralling piece for Bloomberg:

I spent six months investigating the clandestine world of professional roulette players to find out who Tosa is and how he beat the system. The search took me deep into a secret war between those who make a living betting on the wheel and those who try to stop them — and ultimately to an encounter with Tosa himself. The British press got plenty wrong in their reports about what happened on the night of March 15, 2004. There was no laser. But the newspapers were right about one thing: It is possible to beat roulette.